The Potter's Field

by Andrea Camilleri

  But don’t you think that asking me for total freedom and autonomy in investigating the critaru case, of all things, might be a mistake on your part?

  You know I consider you a skillful, intelligent detective. But this seems to me the sort of case that might stymie a policeman even better than the two of us put together.

  If I hesitate to turn it over to you, it is precisely because I am your friend.

  Because, were you to fail, it would create endless complications, and not only in our personal relations.

  Think it over.

  At any rate, if your mind remains unchanged, allow me a few days to decide.

  With unwavering affection,

  Salvo

  He reread the letter. It seemed perfect to him.

  It would help keep Mimì in line for a few days, while the inspector awaited the results of Ingrid’s surveillance. And it gave him no reason to get angry and pull any more stupid stunts.

  He got up, opened the door, and called Galluzzo.

  “Listen, do me a favor and type up this letter. Then put it in an envelope and write: ‘For Inspector Domenico Augello / Personal and Confidential’ on it. Then deliver it to him. Is he in his office?”

  Galluzzo only gawked at him, bewildered. No doubt he was wondering why Montalbano and Augello had suddenly decided to use him as their personal secretary.

  “He hasn’t come in yet.”

  “Give it to him as soon as he arrives.”

  But Galluzzo made no move to leave the room. He clearly felt torn.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Well, yes, Chief. Could you tell me why you, too, are having me type up a letter?”

  “So that you know exactly how things stand. You’ve read the one Mimì wrote to me, and now you can read my reply,” he said sharply—so sharply that Galluzzo reacted.

  “Excuse me for saying so, Chief, but I don’t understand. First of all, you can’t type up a letter without reading it. And, second of all, after I know how things stand between the two of you, what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. You decide.”

  “Chief, you’ve got me all wrong,” said Galluzzo, offended. “I’m not the kind of guy who goes around telling everybody and his dog what goes on in here.”

  Montalbano felt Galluzzo was being sincere and immediately regretted what he’d said. But the damage had been done. Directly or indirectly, Mimì Augello was sowing discord and resentment in his police department. The problem had to be resolved as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, he could only hope that Ingrid would manage to discover something.

  “Catarella! Ring Forensics for me and get Dr. Arquà on the line!”

  “Hello,” said Arquà after a spell.

  “Montalbano here. You asked for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to prove to you that I am a gentleman and you are a boor.”

  “An impossible task.”

  “Professor Lomascolo called me from Palermo ahead of time with the results of his examination of the dental bridge. Interested?”

  “Yes.”

  “It took him only an hour, he said, to be absolutely certain that this kind of bridge was commonly used in South America until a few years ago. Happy?”

  The inspector said nothing. What the hell was the little shit getting at?

  “I made a point of letting you know at once,” Arquà continued, shooting the venom from his tail. “I hope you’re able, with your usual acumen, to find the right dentist among the million or more practicing in that part of the world. Bye.”

  Fucker. Actually, no: motherfucking son of a bitch. Actually, no: motherfucking son of a stinking whore.

  If that goddamned bridge might actually be of any use to the case, never in a million years would the guy have called him. He only wanted the satisfaction of telling him that the bridge would never help him to cross the great sea of shit this case was.

  Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to turn it over to Mimì.

  It was time to go eat, but he didn’t have even a hint of appetite.

  His thoughts felt a bit muddled, as if a few drops of glue had oozed into his brain. He felt his forehead. It was hot. Apparently the result of the morning’s bravado.

  He decided to go straight home to Marinella and told Catarella he wouldn’t be back at the office in the afternoon.

  When he got home, he started looking for the thermometer. It wasn’t in the medicine chest, where he usually kept it. It wasn’t in the drawer of his nightstand either. After searching for twenty minutes he finally found it between the pages of a book. Ninety-nine point five. He took an aspirin from the medicine chest, went into the kitchen, and turned on the faucet, but not a single drop of water came out. He cursed the saints. But why curse the saints when it was his own fault? There was a bottle of mineral water in the refrigerator, and he poured himself a glass. But then he remembered that aspirin shouldn’t be taken on an empty stomach. He needed to eat something. He reopened the refrigerator. Lacking water, Adelina had used her brains. Caponatina, caciocavallo di Ragusa, and sardines in onion sauce.

  Without knowing how or why, he suddenly felt ravenous. He brought everything out onto the veranda, along with a bottle of cold white wine. He spent an hour savoring it all. And thus, afterwards, he could take the aspirin without worry.

  When he woke up it was almost five in the afternoon. He took his temperature. Ninety-eight. The aspirin had brought it down. But perhaps it was best to stay in bed. Reading a book, for example.

  He got up, went to the bookcase in the living room, and started scanning the titles. His eye fell upon a book by Andrea Camilleri from a few years back, which he hadn’t yet read. He brought it back to bed with him and started reading it.

  Taking off from a passage in a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, the book was about a man named Patò, a serious, upstanding bank manager who amused himself by playing the role of Judas in the annual production of the Mortorio, a popular version of the Passion of Christ.

  As is well known, Judas repented after betraying Jesus Christ, throwing the thirty pieces of silver he had received for his treachery into the temple, and then running off to hang himself. And the Mortorio play followed the Gospel story every step of the way. There was, however, one variant in the stage production: As Patò-Judas tightened the noose around his neck, a trapdoor opened under his feet, symbolizing the mouth of Hell, and the betrayer would plummet into this hole, ending up in the understage.

  In Camilleri’s novel, everything went as it had always done, as if according to script, except for the fact that, once the performance was over, Patò never reappeared. Everyone set about looking for him, to no avail. He had vanished forever after being swallowed up by the trapdoor.

  The book continued with conjectures, some quite farfetched, by common people and experts, and an investigation was conducted by a police detective and a marshal of the carabinieri in hopes of resolving the mystery of the disappearance.

  After three hours of reading, the inspector’s vision started to blur.

  Wasn’t it perhaps time to have his eyes examined? No, he answered himself, it was not time. He well knew his eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but even if he were to turn blind, he would never give in and wear glasses.

  He set the book down on the nightstand, got out of bed, went into the living room, and sat down in the armchair in front of the television. Turning it on, he was greeted by none other than the chicken-ass face of Pippo Ragonese.

  “. . . owning up to our mistakes, on those fortunately rare occasions when we do make mistakes, is the indisputable mark of fairness and good faith on our part. Indeed fairness and good faith are the shining beacons that have always lighted the way during our thirty years of delivering the news. Well, we did recently make one such mistake. We accused Chief Inspector Salvo Montalbano of the Vigàta Police of not pursuing a possible lead in the case of the unknown and dismembered murder victim found
in an arid stretch of land called ’u critaru. This lead turned out to have no connection to that horrific crime. We therefore extend our public apologies to Inspector Montalbano. This does not mean, however, that our reservations about him and the methods he often applies are thereby diminished. But now I would like to talk about the town council of Montereale, which recently . . .”

  Montalbano turned it off. So the commissioner had kept his word.

  He stood up, feeling restless. He started fidgeting about the house.

  There was something in Camilleri’s novel that kept buzzing in his brain.

  What was it? Was it possible his memory, too, was beginning to fail?

  Was this already the start of arteriosclerosis?

  He tried hard to remember.

  It was definitely something to do with the death of Judas but wasn’t actually written in the book.

  It was a sort of parallel thought that appeared and vanished like a flash. But if it was a parallel thought, there was no point in rereading the novel from the start. It was unlikely the flash would repeat itself.

  Still, there might be a way.

  Somewhere in his library he must have the four Gospels in a single volume. Where were they hidden? Why was everything always disappearing in this house? First the thermometer, now the Gospels . . . At last he found them, after half an hour of a panoply of curses unsuitable to the book he wanted to read.

  He sat back down in the armchair and looked up, in the first Gospel, that of Matthew, the passage that recounted the suicide of Judas.

  Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,

  Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? See thou to that.

  And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.

  And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.

  And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.1

  The other Gospels didn’t talk about the death of Judas.

  Though he didn’t quite know why, he felt excited. A sort of tremor ran through his whole body. He was like a dog pointing towards its prey. He sensed that there was something of great importance in those lines of Matthew.

  With saintly patience he read the verses again, slowly, almost syllable by syllable.

  When he reached the words, the potter’s field, he felt an actual shock.

  The potter’s field.

  All at once, he found himself again on a footpath, his clothes drenched with rain, looking out over a gorge made up of slabs of clay. And he heard the peasant’s words again:

  “. . . this place’s always been called ’u critaru . . . I sell the clay to people who make vases, jugs, pots, that kind of thing . . .”

  The potter’s field. Sicilian translation: ’u critaru.

  That was the parallel thought he’d had.

  But did it mean anything? Might it not be a simple coincidence ? Wasn’t he perhaps getting carried away by his imagination? Fine, but what was wrong with having a little imagination? How many times had things he’d imagined proved to be real?

  Let’s allow, then, that this imagining meant something. What could it mean that the body of the murder victim was found in a potter’s field? The Gospel said that the priests had bought the field to bury strangers in . . .

  Wait a second, Montalbà.

  Wasn’t it possible the victim was a “stranger”—in other words, a foreigner? Pasquano had found a bridge in his stomach, and this kind of bridge, according to Professor Lomascolo, was used by dentists in South America. So the stranger was probably from one of those countries—a Venezuelan or Argentinean . . . Or maybe Colombian. A Colombian with Mafia connections to boot . . .

  Aren’t you perhaps sailing too far out to sea, Montalbà?

  As he asked himself this question, a cold shudder ran through his body, followed at once by a great wave of heat. He felt his forehead. The fever was rising again. But he didn’t worry, because he was certain that this change was due not to influenza but to the ideas percolating in his brain.

  Better not push it, however. Better pause awhile and calm down. He realized his brain was overheating and ready to melt. He needed to seek distraction. How? The only solution was to watch television. So he turned it back on, but this time tuned in to the “Free Channel.”

  They were broadcasting a softcore porn film, the kind where the actors and actresses only pretend to fuck, usually in rather uncomfortable places like inside a wheelbarrow or while holding on to a gutter pipe, and they’re worse than the hardcore flicks, in which they actually fuck. He sat and watched it for ten minutes or so and, as always happened, with softcore as well as hardcore, it put him to sleep. And he slept just like that, head bent backwards, mouth open.

  He didn’t know how long he had slept, but when he woke up, in the place of the porn flick were four people around a small table talking about crimes that had never been solved. But even crimes that appear to have been solved—said a man with mustache and goatee à la D’Artagnan—all remain, in fact, unsolved. And he gave a sly smile and said nothing else. Since none of the other participants had understood a fucking thing of what they had just heard, another guy who was a professional criminologist (why do criminologists always have Mosesesque beards?) began to recount a crime committed in northern Italy, where a woman was murdered with mouse poison and then dismembered.

  The same word Pasquano had used. Dismembered.

  What, in fact, had the doctor said about this?

  That the body had been cut into a certain number of pieces. Yes, but how many?

  He shot to his feet, stunned and sweaty, his fever spiking a few degrees more. He ran to the telephone and dialed.

  It rang and rang a long time with no answer. All right, multiplication tables for—come off it! Multiplication tables?! If these guys didn’t pick up, he was going to do a Columbine! He was gonna get in the car and go shoot them all, one by one! Finally a man’s voice answered, sounding so drunk he could smell the guy’s breath over the telephone line.

  “H’lo? ’Ooziss?”

  “Montalbano here. I’d like to speak with Dr. Pasquano.”

  “M . . . morgue’s c . . . closed a’ nnight.”

  So he must be at home. A sleepy-sounding woman answered the phone. What the hell time was it?

  “Montalbano here. Is the doctor at home?”

  “No, Inspector. He’s gone to the club.”

  “I’m sorry, signora, but have you got the telephone number?”

  Pasquano’s wife gave it to him, and he dialed it.

  “Hello? Montalbano here.”

  “What the hell do I care?” said somebody, hanging up.

  He must have dialed wrong. All his fingers were trembling and hard to control.

  “Montalbano here. Is Dr. Pasquano there?”

  “I’ll go and see if he can come to the phone.”

  Multiplication table for seven. Complete.

  “I’m sorry, but he’s playing and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Listen, tell him either he comes to the phone, or I’m going to show up at his place at five o’clock in the morning with the police department’s marching band. The program will be: first number, the triumphal march of the Aida; second number—”

  “Wait. I’ll go and tell him right away.”

  Multiplication table for eight.

  “Can’t a gentleman sit in peace for a few minutes without you always coming along and breaking his balls? Eh? What fucking way of going about things is this? Are you even aware of it? Eh? Why do you need to come scratching around my door all the time? Eh? What the hell do you want?”

  “Did you get it out of your system, Doctor?”

  “Not entirel
y. The pain in the ass is great.”

  “May I speak?”

  “Yes, but then you must vanish from the face of the earth, because if I run into you, I’m going to perform an autopsy without anesthesia.”

  “Can you tell me exactly how many pieces the body was cut into?”

  “I forget.”

  “Please, Doctor.”

  “Wait while I do a tally. So, the fingers of both hands and the toes of both feet make twenty . . . then the legs . . . the ears . . . in toto, twenty-nine, no, wait. Thirty pieces.”

  “Are you sure? Thirty?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  That was why they had left one arm attached. Had they cut it off, that would have made thirty-one pieces. Whereas it had to be exactly thirty.

  Like Judas’s thirty pieces of silver.

  He could no longer stand the heat inside the house. He got dressed, put on a heavy jacket, and went out on the veranda to think.

  That they had a Mafia murder on their hands he had become convinced from the moment Pasquano told him the stranger had been killed with one shot to the base of the skull. A typical procedure that connected, with an invisible thread, the worst kind of criminal cruelty with certain methods sanctioned by time-honored military custom.

  But here something else was emerging.

  Whoever killed the stranger was purposely providing the inspector with precise information as to the whys and wherefores of the killing itself.

  Meanwhile, this murder had been committed, or ordered—which amounted to the same thing—by someone who still operated in observance of the rules of the “old” Mafia.

  Why?

  The answer was simple: Because the new Mafia fired their guns pell-mell and in every direction, at old folks and kids, wherever and whenever, and never deigned to give a reason or explanation for what they did.