The Potter's Field Read online

  What is this, anyway? he thought as he was sipping his coffee, which tasted like reheated chicory broth. Isn’t it well-known that the older you get, the less sleep you need? So why was it that in his case, the more the years went by, the more he slept?

  “ ’Ow’s the coffee taste, Chief?”

  “Perfect, Cat.”

  And he raced into the bathroom to rinse his mouth, for fear he might start vomiting.

  “Cat, is this a pressing matter?”

  “Relative, Chief.”

  “All right, then, give me a few minutes to shower and get dressed.”

  When all clean and dressed, he went into the kitchen and made himself a proper pot of coffee.

  Going back into the dining room, he found Catarella in front of the French doors that gave onto the veranda. He had opened the shutters.

  It was pouring. The sea had, in fact, come all the way up to the veranda, shaking it from time to time with the undertow of a particularly strong wave.

  “C’n I talk now, Chief ?” Catarella asked.

  “Yes.”

  “They found a dead body.”

  Ah, what a discovery! What a find! Apparently the corpse of someone who’d died a “white death”—the shorthand used by journalists when someone suddenly disappears without so much as saying goodbye—had resurfaced somewhere. But why give death any color at all? White death! As if death could also be green, yellow, and so on . . . Actually, if one had to give death a color, there could only be one: black, black as pitch.

  “Is it fresh?”

  “They din’t say, Chief.”

  “Where’d they find it?”

  “Out inna country, Chief. Pizzutello districk.”

  Imagine that. A desolate, godforsaken place, all sheer drops and jagged spurs, where a corpse could feel at home and never be discovered.

  “Have any of our people been out to see it?”

  “Yessir, Chief, Fazio and Isspector Augello’s at the premisses.”

  “So why’d you come and bust my balls?”

  “Chief, y’gotta unnastand, ’s was Isspector Augello ’at call me and tell me to tell yiz yer poissonal presence ’s ’ndisposable. An’ so, seein’ as how ’s was no answer when I tried a call yiz onna phone, I took the Jeep and come out here poissonally in poisson.”

  “Why’d you take the Jeep?”

  “Cuz the reggler car coun’t never make it to that place, Chief.”

  “All right then, let’s go.”

  “Chief, ’e also tol’ me to tell yiz iss bitter if y’ put on some boots an’ a raincoat, an sump’n a cover y’head.”

  The pinwheel of curses that burst from Montalbano’s mouth left Catarella trembling.

  The deluge showed no sign of letting up. They rolled along almost blindly, as the windshield wipers were unable to sweep the water away. On top of this, the last half mile before reaching the spot where the corpse had been found felt like a cross between a roller coaster and an 8.0 earthquake at its peak. The inspector’s bad mood deteriorated into a silence so heavy that it made Catarella nervous, and he began to drive in such a way as not to miss a single pothole now become a lake.

  “Did you remember to bring life preservers?”

  Catarella didn’t answer, wishing only that he were the corpse they were going to see. At one point Montalbano’s stomach turned upside down, bringing the nauseating taste of Catarella’s coffee back up into his throat and mouth.

  Finally, by the grace of God, they pulled up alongside the other Jeep that Augello and Fazio had taken. The only problem was that there was no sign anywhere of Augello or Fazio, or of any corpse whatsoever.

  “Are we playing hide-and-seek or something?” Montalbano inquired.

  “Chief, alls they tol’ me was to stop as soon as I seen their Jeep.”

  “Give a toot.”

  “A toot o’ wha’, Chief ?”

  “What the hell do you think, Cat? A toot of your trumpet ? A toot of your tenor sax? Honk the goddamn horn!”

  “The horn don’ work, Chief.”

  “Well, I guess that means we’ll have to wait here till dark.”

  He fired up a cigarette. By the time he’d finished it, Catarella had made up his mind.

  “Chief, I’m gonna go look for ’em m’self. Seeing as how their Jeep’s right here, maybe it means they’re maybe right here, inna ’sinnity.”

  “Take my raincoat.”

  “Nah, Chief, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cuz a raincoat’s civillan ’n’ I’m in uniform.”

  “But who’s gonna see you here?”

  “Chief, a uniform’s always a uniform.”

  He opened the door, got out, gasped “Ah,” and vanished. He disappeared so quickly, in fact, that Montalbano feared he might have fallen into a ditch full of water and was now drowning. He quickly got out of the car himself, and in the twinkling of an eye found himself sliding ass to the ground down a muddy slope some thirty feet long at the bottom of which sat Catarella, looking like a sculpture made out of fresh clay.

  “I mussa parked the Jeep right aside the edge wittout realizin’ it, Chief.”

  “I figured that, Cat. So, how are we going to climb out of here now?”

  “Look, Chief, see ’at little path over there, over onna left? I’m gonna go ’ave a look-see, ’n’ you c’n follow me, but be real careful, cuz iss all slip’ry ’n’ all.”

  About fifty yards on, the path turned to the right. The heavy rain made it impossible to see even a short distance ahead. Suddenly Montalbano heard someone calling from above.

  “Chief ! We’re over here!”

  He looked up. Fazio was standing atop a sort of elevation, reachable via three huge steps cut directly into the rock face. He was sheltered under an enormous red-and-yellow umbrella of the kind shepherds use. Where on earth had he found it? To climb the three steps, Montalbano had to have Catarella push him from behind and Fazio pull him up by the hand.

  I’m no longer cut out for this life, he thought bitterly.

  The elevation turned out to be a tiny, level clearing in front of the entrance to a cave that one could enter. Once inside, the inspector was wonderstruck.

  It was warm in the cave. A fire was burning inside a circle of rocks. A carter’s oil lamp hung from the vault and gave off sufficient light. Mimì and a man of about sixty with a pipe in his mouth were each sitting on a stool made of tree branches and playing cards on a little table between them, also made of branches. Every so often, taking turns, they took a sip from a flask of wine on the ground. A pastoral scene. Especially as there was no hint of the corpse anywhere. The sixtyish man greeted the inspector; Mimì did not. In fact, for the past month or so, Augello had been at odds with all of creation.

  “The dead body was discovered by that man playing cards with Inspector Augello,” said Fazio, gesturing towards the man. “His name’s Pasquale Ajena, and this is his land. He comes here every day. And he’s equipped the cave so that he can eat here, rest here, or just sit here and look out at the landscape.”

  “May I humbly ask where the hell the body is?”

  “Apparently, it’s about fifty yards further down.”

  “Apparently? Are you saying you haven’t seen it yet?”

  “Yes. According to Mr. Ajena, the spot is practically unreachable, unless it stops raining.”

  “But this isn’t going to stop before evening, if we’re lucky!”

  “There’ll be a break in the clouds in about an hour,” Ajena cut in. “Guaranteed, with a twist of lemon on it. And then it’ll start raining again.”

  “So what are we supposed to do here till then?”

  “Have you eaten this morning?” Ajena asked him.

  “No.”

  “Would you like a little fresh tumazzo with a slice of wheat bread made yesterday?”

  Montalbano’s heart opened and let in a gentle breeze of contentment.

  “I don’t mind if I do.”

  Ajena go
t up, opened a spacious haversack that was hanging from a nail, pulled out a loaf of bread, a whole tumazzo cheese, and another flask of wine. Pushing aside the playing cards, he set them all down on the little table. Then he extracted a knife from his pocket, a kind of jackknife, which he opened and laid down beside the bread.

  “Help yourselves,” he said.

  “Could you tell me at least how you found the body?” asked Montalbano, mouth full of bread and cheese.

  “No, come on!” Mimì Augello burst out. “First, he has to finish the game. I haven’t been able to win a single one so far!”

  Mimì lost that one too, and so he wanted another rematch, and another rematch after that. Montalbano, Fazio, and Catarella, who was drying himself by the fire, packed in the tumazzo, which was so tender it melted in one’s mouth, and knocked back the entire flask of wine.

  Thus an hour passed.

  And, as Ajena had predicted, there was a break in the clouds.

  2

  “What the . . . ?” said Ajena, looking downwards. “It was right here!”

  They stood all in a row, elbow to elbow, on a narrow footpath, looking down below towards a very steep stretch of earth, practically a sheer drop. But it wasn’t actually earth, properly speaking. It was an assortment of grayish, yellowish slabs of clay that the rainwater did not penetrate, all of them covered, or rather, coated, with a sort of treacherous shaving cream. You could tell from the look of the slabs that you had only to set your foot down on them to find yourself suddenly twenty yards below.

  “It was right here!” Ajena repeated.

  And now it was gone. The traveling corpse, the wandering cadaver.

  During the descent towards the spot where Ajena had spotted the corpse, it was impossible to exchange so much as a word, because they had to walk in single file, with Ajena at the head, leaning on a shepherd’s crook, Montalbano behind, leaning on Ajena, hand on his shoulder, Augello next, hand on Montalbano’s shoulder, and Fazio behind him, hand on Augello’s shoulder.

  Montalbano recalled having seen something similar in a famous painting. Brueghel? Bosch? But this was hardly the moment for art.

  Catarella, who was the last in line, and not only in a hierarchical sense, didn’t have the courage to lean on the shoulder of the person in front of him, and thus slid from time to time in the mud, knocking into Fazio, who knocked into Augello, who knocked into Montalbano, who knocked into Ajena, threatening to bring them all down like bowling pins.

  “Listen, Ajena,” Montalbano said irritably, “are you sure this is the right place?”

  “Inspector, this land is all mine and I come here every day, rain or shine.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “If you wanna talk, sir, let’s talk,” said Ajena, lighting his pipe.

  “So, according to you, the body was here?”

  “Wha’, you deaf, sir? An’ whattya mean, ‘according to me’? It was right here, I tell you,” said Ajena, gesturing with his pipe at the spot where the slabs of clay began, a short distance from his feet.

  “So it was out in the open.”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “Explain.”

  “Mr. Inspector, it’s all clay around here. In fact, this place has always been called ’u critaru, ’n’ that’s—”

  “Why have a place like this?”

  “I sell the clay to people who make vases, jugs, pots, that kind of thing . . .”

  “All right, go on.”

  “Well, when it’s not raining, an’ it don’t rain much around here, today’s an exception, but when it don’t rain, the clay’s all covered up by the dirt that slides down the hillside. So you gotta dig down at least a foot to get at it. You follow?”

  “Yes.”

  “But when it rains, and rains hard, the water washes away the dirt on top, an’ so the clay comes out. An’ that’s wha’ happened this morning: The rain carried the soil further down an’ uncovered the dead body.”

  “So you’re telling me the body was buried under the earth, and the rain unearthed it?”

  “Yessir, that’s azackly what I’m saying. I was passing by here on my way up to the cave an’ that’s when I saw the bag.”

  “What bag?”

  “A great big plastic bag, black, the kind you use for garbage.”

  “How did you manage to see what was inside? Did you open it?”

  “Nah, I didn’t need to. The bag had a small hole an’ a foot was sticking out, except that all its toes was cut off an’ so I couldn’t really tell at first if it was a foot.”

  “Cut off, you say?”

  “Cut off, or maybe et off by some dog.”

  “I see. What did you do then?”

  “I kept on walking up to the cave.”

  “And how did you call the police station?” asked Fazio.

  “Wit’ my cell phone, which I keep in my pocket.”

  “What time was it when you spotted the bag?” Augello cut in.

  “Maybe six in the morning.”

  “And it took you over an hour to get from here to the cave and call us?” Augello pressed him.

  “And what’s it to you, may I ask, how long it took me to call?”

  “I’ll show you what it is to me!” said Mimì, enraged.

  “We got your call at seven-twenty,” Fazio said to the man, trying to explain. “One hour and twenty minutes after you discovered the bag with the body.”

  “What did you do? Make sure to tell someone to come and pick up the body?” Augello asked, suddenly seeming like a dastardly detective in an American movie.

  Worried, Montalbano realized Mimì wasn’t pretending.

  “Who ever said that? What are you thinking? I didn’t tell nobody!”

  “Then tell us what you did for that hour and twenty minutes.”

  Mimì had fastened on to him like a rabid dog and wouldn’t let go.

  “I was thinking things over.”

  “And it took you almost an hour and a half to think things over?”

  “Yessirree.”

  “To think what over?”

  “Whether it was best to phone or not.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause anytime anybody’s got to deal with you cops, they end up wishin’ they hadn’t.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Mimì, turning red in the face and raising his hand to deliver a punch.

  “Cool it, Mimì!” said Montalbano.

  “Listen,” Augello continued, looking for an excuse to have it out with the man, “there are two ways to reach the cave, one from above, the other from below. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why did you take us on the downhill path? So we could break our necks?”

  “Because you guys woulda never made it uphill. With all this rain the path’s slippery as hell.”

  They heard a dull rumble, and all looked up at the sky. The break in the clouds, instead of opening, was beginning to close. They all were thinking the same thing: If they didn’t find that body soon, they were going to get even more soaked.

  “How do you explain the fact that the body is gone?” Montalbano intervened.

  “Well,” said Ajena, “either the body got flushed down to the bottom by the water and soil, or somebody came and took it.”

  “Go on!” said Mimì. “If somebody came and took the bag, they would’ve left a trail in the mud! Whereas there’s nothing!”

  “Whattya mean, sir?” Ajena retorted. “Do you really think after all this rain you’re still gonna see tracks?”

  At this point in the discussion, for who knows what reason, Catarella took a step forward, and so began his second slide of the morning. He had only to set one foot half down on the clay to execute a figure-skating sort of split, one foot on the path, the other on the edge of a clay slab. Fazio, who was standing beside him, tried to grab him on the fly, to no avail. In fact, in so doing he only managed to give Catarella a strong if involuntary push. Thus in a split second Catarella spread his arms,
then spun around, turning his back as his legs flew out from under him.

  “I loss my balaaaa . . .” he announced loudly to one and all as he fell hard on his can and, in that position, as though sitting on an invisible sled, began to gain momentum (reminding Montalbano of a law of physics he had learned at school: Motus in fine velocior), whereupon he fell head backwards, shoulders to the mud, and careered downwards with the speed of a bobsledder. His race ended some twenty yards below, at the bottom of the slope, in a large bush that Catarella’s body entered like a bullet and then disappeared.

  None of the spectators uttered a word; none made any move. They just stood there, spellbound.

  “Get that man some help,” Montalbano ordered after a moment.

  His balls were so severely busted by this whole affair that he didn’t even feel like laughing.

  “How do we get down there to pull him out?” Augello asked Ajena.

  “If we go down this same footpath we’ll come to a spot not far from where the p’liceman ended up.”

  “Then let’s get moving.”

  But at that moment Catarella emerged from the bush. He’d lost his trousers and underpants in the slide and was prudishly holding his hands over his private parts.

  “Did you hurt yourself ?” Fazio shouted.

  “Nah. But I found the body bag. Iss here.”

  “Should we go down there?” Mimì Augello asked Montalbano.

  “No. Now we know where it is. Fazio, you go down and get Catarella. You, Mimì, go and wait for them in the cave.”

  “And what about you?” asked Augello.

  “I’m going to get in the Jeep and go home. I’ve had enough of this.”

  “I beg your pardon? What about the investigation?”

  “What investigation, Mimì? If the body was fresh, then our presence here might serve some purpose. But who knows when and where this person was murdered? You need to call the prosecutor, coroner, and the Forensics lab. Do it now, Mimì.”

  “But to get here from Montelusa, it’ll take those guys a good two hours at the very least!”

  “In two hours it’ll be raining hard again,” Ajena chimed in.