IM10 August Heat (2008) Page 15

  Montalbano realized that in the end he would not be able to say no to her.The soldier would go to war, there were no two ways about it.And anyway, the sun was beating down on them like a sledgehammer there in the parking lot. It was impossible to remain out in the open one moment longer.

  “All right, get in.”

  Getting into the car was like lying down on a grill.

  Montalbano regretted not bringing his minifan. Adriana opened all the windows.

  For the duration of the drive, she sat with her head leaning out the window, eyes closed.

  The inspector, on the other hand, had a nagging question boring into his brain: Wasn’t he doing something incredibly stupid? Why had he agreed to go along? Just because the heat in the parking lot made it impossible to discuss things? But that was only the excuse he’d come up with on the spot.The truth was that he rather liked helping this girl, who—

  Who could be your own daughter! his conscience interrupted.

  You stay out of this! Montalbano replied angrily. I was thinking of something entirely different, that is, that this poor girl has been carrying a terrible weight inside her for six years, the exact intuition of what happened to her sister, and only now is she finding the strength to talk about it and unburden herself. It’s only right to help her.

  You’re just a hypocrite, worse than Tommaseo, said the voice of his conscience.

  As soon as they turned onto the dirt road to Pizzo, Adriana opened her eyes.

  When they were passing in front of her house, the girl said:

  “Stop!”

  She didn’t get out, but only looked at the house from the car.

  “We’ve never gone back since then. I know that from time to time Papa sends a woman over to clean it and keep it in order, but we just haven’t had the courage to come back here in the summer, like we used to do . . . Okay, we can go now.”

  When Montalbano pulled up in front of the last house, the girl was already opening the car door.

  “Do you really have to do this, Adriana?”

  “Yes.”

  He left the car open, the keys in the ignition. In any case, there was not a living soul around.

  Once out of the car, Adriana took his hand and brought it to her lips, resting them there for a moment, then continued holding it tightly. He led her to the side of the house where one could enter the illegal apartment. Forensics had placed two planks there to facilitate descent.The window to the small bathroom was covered with ribbons of colored plastic of the sort used for road work. From one of these strips dangled a sheet of paper with stamps and signatures. It was the official seal.The inspector removed it all and went in first, telling the girl to wait for him. He turned on the flashlight he’d brought with him and checked all the rooms.The few minutes it took to walk around the apartment sufficed to drench him in sweat.There was a sort of viscous humidity in those underground rooms, and it felt grimy, dirty; the stale, heavy air burned the eyes and throat.

  He went back and helped the girl climb through the window.

  Once inside, Adriana took the flashlight from him and started walking, heading straight for the living room.

  As if she’d been there before, the inspector thought, bewildered, as he followed her.

  Adriana then stopped in the doorway to the living room and shone the flashlight’s beam on the walls, the pile of frames wrapped in plastic, and the trunk. She acted as if she’d forgotten that Montalbano was beside her. She said nothing, but was breathing heavily.

  “Adriana . . .”

  The girl didn’t hear him, but only continued her personal descent into hell.

  She started walking, but slowly, as though uncertain. She turned slightly to the left, towards the trunk, then turned again to the right, took three steps, and stopped.

  As she was moving about in this manner, Montalbano, who ended up almost in front of her, noticed she had her eyes closed. She was looking for an exact spot, not with her eyes, but with some other, unknown sense that she alone must have possessed.

  Having arrived to the left of the French door, she placed her hands on the wall as though bracing herself, her legs spread apart.

  “Matre santa!” Montalbano said in terror.

  Was he witnessing a sort of reenactment of what had happened in that room? Was Adriana perhaps possessed by Rina’s spirit?

  All at once the flashlight fell to the floor. Luckily it didn’t go out.

  Adriana was standing in the exact same spot where Forensics had placed the pool of blood. Her body was shaking all over.

  It’s not possible, it’s not possible! Montalbano said to himself.

  His rational mind refused to believe what he saw.

  Then he heard a sound that paralyzed him. Not weeping, but a kind of wail. Like a mortally wounded animal’s wail, long, sustained, soft. It was coming from Adriana.

  Montalbano sprang, bent down, picked up the flashlight, grabbed the girl by the hips and pulled. But she resisted. It was as though her hands were glued to the wall.The inspector then worked his way between her arms and the wall, shot the beam of the flashlight in her face, but the girl still had her eyes closed.

  From her twisted, half-open mouth came the distressing wail, and now there was a thread of drool as well. Dismayed, he slapped her hard twice, with the front and the back of his hand.

  Adriana reopened her eyes, looked at him, and embraced him with all her might, pressing her body firmly against him and pushing him up against the wall. Then she kissed him hard, biting his lips. Montalbano felt the ground go out from under his feet and grabbed on to her as if not to fall, as her kiss went on and on.

  Then the girl let go, turned, ran to the bathroom window, and climbed through it. Montalbano followed fast behind her, having no time to put the seals back up.

  Racing to Montalbano’s car,Adriana got into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. Montalbano barely managed in time to get in on the other side as the car was pulling away.

  Adriana then stopped the car in front of her house, got out, ran to the door, searched in her pockets, found the key, opened the door, and went in, leaving it open behind her.

  By the time Montalbano was inside, she was gone.

  What should he do now? He heard her vomiting somewhere.

  He went outside and slowly walked around the house. The silence was total. Except for the thousands of cicadas, that is.At one time there must have been a field of wheat behind the house, because he saw a pagliaro there, a tall, narrow hut made of straw and agave flowers.

  Under a clump of long-yellowed weeds, a sparrow was rolling around in the dry dirt, cleaning itself in the absence of water.

  He felt like doing the same. He, too, needed to clean himself, of all the filth that had stuck to his skin when he was in the underground apartment.

  Then, without realizing what he was doing, he did something he used to do as a little boy. He took off his shirt, pants, and underwear, and, completely naked, pressed his body against the pagliaro.

  Then he opened his arms as wide as he could and embraced the hut, trying to stick his head as far inside as possible. He was forcing his way into the pagliaro, thrusting all of his body weight forward, moving it first to the right, then to the left. And when, at last, he began to smell the clean, dry odor of withered straw, he breathed it in deep, and deeper still, until he detected a scent that surely existed only in his imagination, that of the sea breeze, which had managed to wend its way into the dense web of dried stalks and remain trapped therein. A sea breeze with a slightly bitter aftertaste, as if burnt by the August heat.

  All at once, half the pagliaro collapsed on top of him, covering him up.

  He stayed that way, immobile, feeling cleansed by every blade of straw that had come to rest on his skin.

  Once, as a child, he had done the exact same thing, and his aunt, no longer seeing him anywhere, had started to call to him.

  “Salvo! Where are you? Salvo?”

  But that wasn’t his a
unt’s voice—that was Adriana calling him, just a few yards away!

  He felt lost. He could not let her see him naked. What the hell had got into him? Why had he gone and done such a silly thing? Was he insane? Was it the intense heat that was making him fuck up so much? How was he going to find a way out of this ridiculous situation?

  “Salvo? Where are you? Sal . . .”

  Surely she had just spotted his clothes on the ground! He realized she was drawing closer.

  She’d found him. Matre santa, how embarrassing! He closed his eyes, hoping to become invisible. He heard her laughing wildly, surely throwing back her beautiful head as she had done at the station. His heart started pounding with increased pressure. Now that was an idea: Why couldn’t he have a nice little heart attack? Then, more strongly than the scent of withered straw, more strongly than the sea breeze, he smelled the overwhelming fragrance of her clean skin. She had taken a shower.The girl must now have been only inches away.

  “If you stick out your arm, I’ll hand you your things,” said Adriana.

  Montalbano obeyed.

  “Okay, don’t worry, I’m turning my back now,” the girl continued.

  The only problem was that she kept laughing, humiliating him, the whole time he was clumsily getting dressed.

  “I’m late,” Adriana said as they were getting into the car. “Would you let me drive?”

  She had realized that, when it came to driving fast, Montalbano was a lost cause.

  For the entire ride—which was over quickly, with them pulling up in the restaurant’s parking lot in the twinkling of an eye—she kept her right hand on his knee, driving with only her left. Was it this way of driving or the heat that left the inspector bathed in sweat?

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t live in Vigàta.”

  Why had he blurted that out?

  “What’s her name?”

  “Livia.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In Marinella.”

  “Give me your home phone number.”

  Montalbano said it, and she repeated it.

  “Already memorized.”

  They arrived. The inspector got out of the car. She too. They found themselves standing one in front of the other. Adriana put her hands on his hips and kissed him lightly.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The inspector watched her drive away, tires screeching.

  He decided not to drop in at the station but to go directly home. It was almost six o’clock when, dressed in his bathing suit, he opened the French door giving onto the veranda. And there he found three youngsters sitting down, two boys and a girl, each about twenty. It was clear they had made his veranda their home for the entire day; they had eaten, drunk, and taken off their clothes to go swimming there. There were still dozens of people on the beach, taking in the sun’s last rays.

  But scattered all across the sand were scraps of paper, leftovers, empty boxes and bottles. In short, a veritable dump. The veranda, too, had been turned into a dump, the deck scattered with a hodgepodge of cigarette butts and roaches, cans of beer and Coca-Cola.

  “Before you leave, I want you to clean all this up,” he said, descending the short flight of steps and heading towards the water.

  “Okay, but you clean your asshole first,” said one of the boys behind him.

  The other two started laughing.

  He could have just ignored it, but he turned around instead and slowly approached them.

  “Who said that?”

  “Me,” said the huskier of the two guys in an arrogant tone.

  “Come down here.”

  The kid looked at his friends.

  “Let’s go help the old man. I’ll be right back.”

  The kid plunked himself in front of him with legs spread, then reached out and shoved him twice.

  “Go take your swim, Grandpa.”

  Montalbano started him out with a left, which the kid dodged, while his right, as planned, got him square in the face and dropped him straight to the ground, half unconscious. It wasn’t so much a punch as a wallop.The other two quickly stopped laughing.

  “When I get back, I want it all cleaned up.”

  He had to swim out a ways to find a bit of clean water, since closer to shore there was all manner of foreign objects, from turds to plastic cups, floating on the surface. A pigsty.

  Before going back, he looked shoreward, searching for a spot where there were fewer people and therefore the water was probably less filthy. This meant, however, that he had to walk for half an hour on the beach to get back to his house.

  The kids were gone. And the veranda was clean.

  In the shower, which was still warm, he thought of the punch that had half knocked the kid out. How could he possibly be still capable of such strength? Then he realized it wasn’t only a question of strength, but also of the violent release of all the tension he had built up inside him on that August 15.

  15

  Late that evening, the families with little kids crying one minute and screaming the next, the drunken, brawling parties of friends, the young couples stuck so tightly together that you couldn’t have separated them with a knife, the solitary males with cell phones glued to their ears, the other young couples with radios, CD players, and other noisemaking gadgets finally vacated the beach.

  They went away, but their garbage remained.

  Garbage, the inspector thought, had become the unmistakable sign that man had passed through any given place. In fact, they say Mount Everest has become a trash heap and that even outer space is a dump.

  Ten thousand years from now, the sole proof that man once lived on this earth will be the discovery of enormous car cemeteries, the only surviving monument of a former, ahem, civilization.

  After he’d been sitting awhile on the veranda, he began to notice that the air stank. The garbage covering the beach was no longer visible in the darkness, yet the stench of rapid putrefaction from the extreme heat still wafted up to his nostrils.

  There was no point in remaining outside. But neither was it possible to stay inside with all the windows closed to keep out the stink, because the heat that the walls had absorbed during the day would never have a chance to dispel.

  So he got dressed, took the car, and headed off in the direction of Pizzo. Arriving at the house, he pulled up, got out, and headed towards the staircase that led down to the beach.

  He sat down on the first step and lit a cigarette. He’d been right. The spot was too high up to be affected by the smell of rot from the garbage that must surely lie scattered across that beach, too.

  He tried not to think of Adriana, but didn’t succeed.

  He stayed that way for two hours, and by the time he got up to go back home, he had come to the conclusion that the less he saw of the girl, the better.

  “So what did Miss Adriana tell you yesterday?” Fazio asked.

  “She told me something I didn’t know for certain but had imagined. Do you remember when Dipasquale told us, and Adriana confirmed, that Rina had been assaulted by Ralf and that Spitaleri had saved her?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  The inspector then recounted the whole story of how from that moment on Spitaleri had been constantly after Rina until he finally groped her in his car, and the girl was saved when a peasant appeared on the scene. And he also mentioned how the peasant had been run through the gauntlet by police when one of Adriana’s earrings was found in his house even though the poor guy had nothing to do with the crime.

  He said not a word about the fact that he had gone back to the house in Pizzo with Adriana or about what had happened there.

  “In conclusion,” said Fazio, “we’ve got nothing to work with. It can’t have been Ralf, because he was impotent, it can’t have been Spitaleri because he was gone, and it can’t have been Dipasquale because he’s got an alibi . . .”

&nb
sp; “Dipasquale’s position is the weakest,” said the inspector. “His alibi may have been made up.”

  “Yeah, but try and prove that.”

  “Chief, iss Porxecutor Dommaseo.”

  “Put ’im on.”

  “Montalbano? I’ve made a decision.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m going to do it.”

  And he’s telling him about it?

  “You’re going to do what?”

  “Hold a press conference.”

  “But what need is there?”

  “Oh, there’s need, Montalbano, there’s need!”

  The only need was Tommaseo’s need to appear on television.

  “The newsmen,” the prosecutor continued,“have gotten wind of something and are starting to ask questions. I don’t want to run the risk of them giving a distorted image of the overall picture.”

  What overall picture?

  “It’s true that’s a pretty big risk.”

  “So you agree?”

  “Have you already set it up?”

  “Yes, for tomorrow morning at eleven. Will you be there?”

  “No. And what will you say?”

  “I’ll talk about the crime.”

  “Will you say she was raped?”

  “Well, I’ll suggest it.”

  Great! It took less than a suggestion to have the journalists jump all over that sort of subject!

  “And what if they ask if you have any idea as to the murderer?”

  “Well, one has to be adroit in these situations.”

  “As you are.”

  “In all modesty . . . I’ll say that we’re following two leads: The first is that we’re checking on the alibis of the masons, and the second is that we’re investigating a maniac drifter who forced the girl to go with him into the underground apartment. Are you in agreement?”

  “Perfectly.”

  A maniac drifter! And how would a maniac drifter have known about the secret illegal apartment if the construction site was fenced off?

  “For today, I’ve called Adriana back in for questioning,” Tommaseo said.“I want to break down any residual defenses she may have, to interrogate her thoroughly—thoroughly and at great length, to lay her completely bare.”