Rounding the Mark (3 page)

“Excuse me,” he said hastily, flipping back onto his belly and looking over at the other.

The person beside him didn’t answer, however, because he wasn’t doing the dead man’s float. He was actually dead. And, to judge from the way he looked, he’d been so for quite a while.

2

Flummoxed, Montalbano started swimming around the body, trying not to make waves with his arms. There was sufficient light now, and the cramp had passed. The corpse certainly wasn’t fresh. It must have been in the water for quite some time, since there wasn’t much flesh left attached to the bone. The head looked practically like a skull. A skull with seaweed for hair. The right leg was coming detached from the rest of the body. The fish and the sea had made a shambles of the poor wretch, probably a castaway or non-European who’d been driven by hunger or despair to try his luck as an illegal immigrant and been chucked overboard by some slave trader a little slimier and nastier than the rest. Yes, that corpse must have hailed from far away. Was it possible that the whole time it had been floating out there not a single trawler, or any boat at all, had noticed it? Unlikely. No doubt somebody had seen it but had promptly fallen in line with the new morality, whereby if you run over someone in your car, for example, you’re supposed to hightail it away and lend no aid. Fat chance a trawler would stop for something so useless as a corpse. Anyway, hadn’t there been some fishermen who, upon finding human remains in their nets, had promptly dumped them back in the sea to avoid bureaucratic hassles? “Pity is dead,” as some song or poem, or whatever the hell it was, once said, a long time ago. And, little by little, compassion, brotherhood, solidarity, and respect for the elderly, the sick, and little children were also dying out, along with the rules of—

Cut the moralistic crap
, Montalbano said to himself,
and try instead to find a way out of this pickle
.

Rousing himself from his thoughts, he looked towards land. Jesus, was it far! How had he ended up so far out? And how the hell was he ever going to tow that corpse ashore? The corpse, meanwhile, had drifted a few yards away, dragged by the current. Was it challenging him to a swimming race? At that moment the solution to the problem came to him. He took off his bathing suit, which, in addition to the elastic waistband, had a long rope around the waist that was purely ornamental and served no purpose. In two strokes he was beside the corpse; after reflecting for a moment, he slipped the bathing suit over the body’s left arm, wrapped it tightly around the wrist, then bound it with one end of the rope. With the other end he tied two firm knots around his own left ankle. If the corpse’s arm didn’t fall off as he was towing it—a very distinct possibility—the whole ordeal might, he was sure, come to a peaceful, happy ending, albeit at the cost of tremendous physical effort.

He began to swim. And for a long stretch he swam rather slowly, necessarily using only his arms, stopping from time to time to catch his breath, or to see if the corpse was still attached to him. Slightly more than halfway to shore, he had to stop for a little longer than usual; he was huffing and puffing like a bellows. When he turned onto his back to do the dead man’s float, the dead man—the real one, that is—flipped face-down from the movement conveyed to him through the rope.

“Please be patient,” Montalbano excused himself.

When his panting had subsided a little, he set off again. After a spell that seemed endless, he realized he had reached a point where he could touch bottom. Slipping the rope off of his foot but hanging onto it with one hand, he stood up. The water came up to his nose. Hopping on tiptoe, he advanced a few more yards until he could finally rest his feet flat on the sand. At this point, feeling safe at last, he tried to take a step forward.

Try as he might, he couldn’t move. He tried again. Nothing. Oh God, he’d become paralyzed! He was like a post planted in the middle of the water, a post with a corpse moored to it. On the beach there wasn’t a soul to whom he might cry for help. Was it maybe all a dream, a nightmare?

Now I’m going to wake up
, he told himself.

But he did not wake up. In despair, he threw his head back and let out a yell so loud that it deafened him. The yell produced two immediate results: the first was that a pair of seagulls hovering over his head and enjoying the farce took fright and flew away; the second was that his muscles and nerves—in short, his whole bodily mechanism—started moving again, though with extreme difficulty. Another thirty steps separated him from the shore, but they were like the climb up Mount Calvary. When he reached the beach, he dropped to the ground, on his ass, and stayed that way, still holding the rope in his hand. He looked like a fisherman unable to drag ashore an oversized fish he’d just caught. He consoled himself with the thought that the worst was over.

“Hands in the air!” a voice cried out behind him.

Befuddled, Montalbano turned his head to look. The person who had spoken, and who was taking aim at him with a revolver that must have dated from the Italo-Turkish War (1911-12), was a reed-thin, nervous man over seventy with wild eyes and sparse hair sticking straight up like iron wire. Next to him was a woman, also past seventy, wearing a straw hat and holding an iron rod that she kept shaking, either as a threat or because she suffered from advanced Parkinson’s Disease.

“Just a minute,” said Montalbano. “I’m—”

“You’re a murderer!” shouted the woman in a voice so shrill that the seagulls, who in the meantime had gathered to enjoy Act II of the farce, darted away, shrieking.

“But signora, I’m—”

“It’s no use denying it, you murderer, I’ve been watching you through my binoculars for the past two hours!” she shouted, even louder than before.

Montalbano felt totally at sea. Without thinking of what he was doing, he dropped the rope, turned around, and stood up.

“Oh my God! He’s naked!” the old lady screamed, taking two steps back.

“You swine! You’re a dead man!” the old man screamed, taking two steps back.

And he fired. The deafening shot passed some twenty yards away from the inspector, who was more frightened by the blast than anything else. Knocked another two steps back by the pistol’s kick, the old man stubbornly took aim again.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy? I’m—”

“Shut up and don’t move!” the old man ordered him. “We’ve called the police. They’ll be here any minute now.”

Montalbano didn’t budge. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the corpse slowly heading back out to sea. When the Lord was good and ready, two speeding cars pulled up with a screech. Seeing Fazio and Gallo, both in civilian dress, get out of the first one, Montalbano took heart. But not for long, because out of the second car stepped a photographer who immediately began shooting, rapid-fire. Recognizing the inspector at once, Fazio shouted to the old man:

“Police! Don’t shoot!”

“How do I know you’re not his accomplices?” was the man’s reply.

And he pointed his pistol at Fazio. But in so doing, he took his eye off Montalbano, who, feeling fed up by this point, sprang forward, grabbed the old man’s wrist, and disarmed him. He was not, however, able to dodge the fierce blow dealt him to the head by the old lady with her iron rod. All at once his vision fogged, his knees buckled, and he passed out.

 
 
After losing consciousness, he must have drifted into sleep, since when he awoke in his bed and looked at the clock, it was eleven-thirty. The first thing he did was sneeze, one sneeze after another after another still. He’d caught cold, and his head hurt like hell. He heard Adelina, his housekeeper, call to him from the kitchen.

“You awake, signore?”

“Yes, but my head hurts. Want to bet the old lady broke it?”

“Even bombs couldna brake dat head of yours, signore.”

The telephone rang. He tried to get up, but a sort of vertigo knocked him back down into bed. How could that old bag have had such strength in her arms? Adelina, meanwhile, answered the phone. He heard her saying:

“He jes’ woke uppa now. Okay, I tell him.”

She appeared with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand.

“Dat was Signor Fazziu. He says he comma to see you here in haffa nour atta most.”

“Adelì, what time did you get here?”

“At nine, as usual, signore. They ha’ put you inna bed, an’ Signor Gallu he stay behind to help. So I says, now I’m here, I can look afta you, an’ so he left.”

She went out of the room and came back with a glass in one hand and a pill in the other.

“I brung you some aspirin.”

Obediently, Montalbano took it. Sitting up in bed, he felt a few chills run through his body. Adelina noticed and, muttering to herself, opened the armoire, grabbed a plaid blanket, and spread it over the bedspread.

“At your age, signore, you got no business doin’ them kinda things.”

At that moment, Montalbano loathed her. He pulled the blanket up over his head and closed his eyes.

 
 
He heard the telephone ringing repeatedly. Why didn’t Adelina answer it? He staggered to his feet and went into the living room.

“H’lo?” he said in a congested voice.

“Inspector? Fazio here. I can’t come, I’m sorry to say. There’s been a snag.”

“Anything serious?”

“No, little shit. I’ll drop by in the afternoon. You take care of that cold in the meantime.”

He hung up and went in the kitchen. Adelina was gone. She’d left a note on the table.

He didn’t feel like opening the refrigerator. He had no appetite. Realizing he was walking around naked as Adam, he put on a shirt, a pair of underpants, and some trousers, and sat down in his usual armchair in front of the TV. It was a quarter to one, time for the midday news on TeleVigàta, a progovernment station whether the government was of the extreme Left or extreme Right. The first thing he saw was himself, stark naked, wild-eyed, mouth agape, hands cupped over his pudenda, looking like a chaste Susannah getting on in years, and a whole lot hairier. A caption under the image said:

“Inspector Montalbano (in the photo) saving a dead man.”

Montalbano remembered the photographer who had arrived behind Fazio and Gallo, and sent him, in his mind, best wishes for a long and prosperous life. Then the purse-lipped, chicken-ass face of Pippo Ragonese, the inspector’s sworn enemy, appeared on the screen.

“Shortly after sunrise this morning . . .”

For those who might not understand, a generic shot of a sunrise appeared.

“... our hero, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, went out for a nice long swim . . .”

A stretch of sea appeared, with some guy swimming far in the distance, tiny and unrecognizable.

“You’re probably thinking that not only is it no longer the season for swimming, but it’s not really the most appropriate time of day for it, either. But what are you going to do? That’s our hero for you. Maybe he felt the need to take a dip to dispel the strange ideas that are often swirling about in his brain. Swimming far offshore, he ran into the corpse of an unknown man. Instead of calling the authorities . . .”

“. . . with the cell phone installed in my dick,” Montalbano chimed in, enraged.

“... our inspector decided to tow the corpse to shore without anyone’s help, tying it to his leg with the bathing suit he was wearing. ‘I can do it all myself,’ that’s his motto. These maneuvers did not escape the attention of Signora Pina Bausan, who had been looking out to sea with a pair of binoculars.”

On-screen appeared the face of Signora Bausan, the lady who’d cracked his skull with an iron bar.

“Where are you from, signora?”

“My husband Angelo and I are both from Treviso.”

“Have you been in Sicily long?”

“We got here four days ago.”

“On vacation?”

“This is no vacation, believe me. I suffer from asthma, and my doctor told me that some sea air would do me good. My daughter Zina is married to a Sicilian who works in Treviso . . .” Here Signora Bausan interrupted her speech with a long, pained sigh, as if to lament the fate that had given her a Sicilian for a son-in-law. “... And she told me to come and stay here, at her husband’s house, which they use only one month out of the year, in the summer. So we came.”

The pained sigh was even longer this time. Life is so hard and dangerous on that savage island!

“Tell me, signora, why were you looking out to sea at that hour?”

“I get up early, and I have to do something, don’t I?”

“And you, Signor Bausan, do you always carry that weapon with you?”

“No, I don’t own any weapons. I borrowed that pistol from a cousin of mine. Since we were coming to Sicily, you understand . . .”

“So you think one should come to Sicily armed?”

“If there’s no rule of law down here, it seems logical, don’t you think?”

Ragonese’s purse-lipped face reappeared on the screen.

“And this gave rise to a huge misunderstanding. Believing—”

Montalbano turned it off. He felt enraged at Bausan, not for having shot at him, but for what he had said. He picked up the phone.

“H’lo, Cadarella?”

“Listen, you motherfucking sonofabitch—”

“Hey, Cad, dode you regogdize me? Id’s Modtadbado.”

“Ah, izzat you, Chief? You gotta cold?”

“No, Cad, I just like talking this way. Lebbe talk to Fadzio.”

“Straight away, Chief.”

Fazio’s voice came on the line: “What is it, Chief?”

“Fazio, what ever happedd to the ode mad’s pistol?”

“You mean Bausan’s? I gave it back to him.”

“Has he god a license for it?”

There was an embarrassed silence.

“I don’t know, Chief. In all that confusion, it slipped my mind.”