Rounding the Mark

by Andrea Camilleri

“The difference is that this time, it’s true.”

  “Ah, so that’s how you see it?”

  “Yes, it is. Explain to me why we acted that way in Genoa, after years and years without any incidents of that sort.”

  Mimì looked at him, eyelids drooping so low that they nearly covered his eyes, and said nothing.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” said the inspector. “Answer me verbally, not with that little ‘cop stare’ of yours.”

  “All right. But first I want to make something clear. I’m in no mood to pick any bones with you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I know what’s bugging you. The fact that all this happened under a government that you don’t trust and openly oppose. You figure the political leaders are up to their necks in this affair.”

  “Excuse me, Mimì, but have you read the newspapers? Have you watched the TV news? They have all said, more or less clearly, that at the time, there were people in the command rooms in Genoa that had no business being there: ministers, members of parliament, all from the same party. The party that’s always calling for law and order. Their law and their order, mind you.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means that part of the police force, the most fragile part—even though they think they’re the strongest—felt protected. So they went wild. And this, in the best of cases.”

  “Could there be any worse?”

  “Of course. Maybe we were manipulated, like marionettes on a stage, by people who wanted to conduct a kind of test.”

  “What kind of test?”

  “Of how people would react to a show of force. How many favorably, how many unfavorably. Luckily it didn’t go too well for them.”

  “Bah!” said Augello, unconvinced.

  Montalbano decided to change the subject.

  “How’s Beba doing?”

  “Not too well. She’s having a difficult pregnancy. She can’t sit up much and has to lie down most of the time, but the doctor says it’s nothing to be worried about.”

  After miles and miles of solitary walks along the jetty, hours and hours spent sitting on the rock of tears, contemplating the events in Genoa until his brain began to smoke; after eating what must have amounted to several hundred pounds of càlia e simenza; after countless nighttime phone conversations with Livia, the wound the inspector carried inside him was beginning at last to heal when he got wind of another brilliant police action, this time in Naples. A handful of cops had been arrested for forcibly removing some allegedly violent political activists from a hospital into which they’d been admitted. After bringing them to a barracks, the police treated them to a flurry of kicks and punches and a torrent of obscenities and insults. But what most upset Montalbano was the reaction of other policemen to the news of their colleagues’ arrest. Some chained themselves to the gate of the Central Police building in an act of solidarity; others organized demonstrations in the streets; the unions made some noise; and a deputy commissioner who in Genoa had kicked a demonstrator already on the ground was greeted as a hero when he came to Naples. The same politicians who’d been in Genoa for the G8 were behind this curious (though not so curious for Montalbano) semirevolt on the part of the forces of order against the judges who had issued the arrest warrants. And Montalbano couldn’t take it any more. This last, bitter morsel he just couldn’t swallow. One morning, as soon as he got to work, he called Dr. Lattes, chief of the Montelusa police commissioner’s cabinet. Half an hour later, Lattes informed him, through Catarella, that the commissioner could see him at twelve noon on the dot. The men at the station, who had learned to gauge their boss’s mood from the way he walked into the office each morning, realized at once that this was not a good day. And so, from the vantage point of Montalbano’s desk, the station seemed deserted that morning. No voices, no sounds whatsoever. Catarella was standing guard at the entrance door, and as soon as anyone came in, he opened his eyes wide, put his forefinger over his nose, and enjoined the intruder to silence.

  “Ssssshhhh!”

  All who entered the station acted like they were attending a wake.

  Around ten o’clock, Mimì Augello, after knocking discreetly and being told to come in, entered the inspector’s office with a grim expression on his face. As soon as he saw him, Montalbano got worried.

  “How’s Beba doing?”

  “Fine. Can I sit down?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can I smoke?”

  “Of course, but don’t let the minister see you.”

  Augello fired up a cigarette, inhaled, and held the smoke in his lungs a long time.

  “You can exhale now,” said Montalbano. “You have my permission.”

  Mimì looked at him, confused.

  “Yes,” the inspector continued, “this morning you seem Chinese to me. You ask my permission for every little thing. What’s wrong? Is it so hard to tell me what you want to tell me?”

  “Yes,” Augello admitted. He put out his cigarette, got more comfortable in his chair, and began, “Salvo, you know I’ve always thought of you as my father—”

  “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “Where’d I get what idea?”

  “That I’m your father. If it was your mother who told you, she’s a liar. I’m fifteen years older than you, and though I may have been precocious, at age fifteen I wasn’t—”

  “Salvo, I didn’t say you were my father, I said I thought of you as a father.”

  “And you got off on the wrong foot. Drop the father, son, and holy ghost shit. Just say what you have to say and get the hell out of my hair, ’cause today’s not a good day.”

  “Why did you ask to see the commissioner?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Catarella.”

  “I’ll deal with him later.”

  “No, you won’t. If anything, you’ll deal with me right now. I was the one who told Catarella to tell me if you contacted Bonetti-Alderighi, which I expected you would do sooner or later.”

  “But what’s so unusual about me, an inspector, wanting to talk to my superior?”

  “Salvo, you know you can’t stand Bonetti-Alderighi. You hate his guts. If he was a priest at your deathbed wanting to give you last rites, you’d get up out of bed and kick him out of your room. I’m gonna talk to you straight, okay?”

  “Talk however the fuck you like.”

  “You want to leave.”

  “A little vacation would do me some good.”

  “You’re unbearable, Salvo. You want to resign.”

  “Don’t I have the right?” Montalbano burst out, sitting up at the edge of his chair, ready to leap to his feet.

  Augello wasn’t intimidated.

  “You have every right. But first let me finish telling you what I have to say. Remember when you said you had a suspicion?”

  “A suspicion of what?”

  “That the events in Genoa had been deliberately provoked by a political faction that in one way or another had promised to protect the police. Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I just want to point out to you that what happened in Naples happened when there was a Center-Left government in power, before the G8 meetings. We just didn’t find out about it till later. What do you make of that?”

  “That makes it even worse. Do you think I haven’t thought about these things, Mimì? It means the whole problem is a lot more serious than we realize.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It means the rot is inside us.”

  “Did you just find that out today? With all the books you’ve read? If you want to quit, go ahead and quit. But not right now. Quit because you’re tired, because you’ve reached the age limit, because your hemorrhoids hurt, because your brain can’t function anymore, but don’t quit now.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because it would be an insult.”

  “An insult to whom?”

  “To me, for one—and I may be a womanizer, but I
’m a decent man. To Catarella, who’s an angel. To Fazio, who’s a classy guy. To everybody who works for the Vigàta Police. To Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi, who’s a pain in the ass and a formalist, but deep down is a good person. To all your colleagues who admire you and are your friends. To the great majority of people who work for the police and have nothing to do with the handful of rogues at the top and the bottom of the totem pole. You’re slamming the door in all of our faces. Think about it. See you later.”

  He got up, opened the door, and went out. At eleven-thirty Montalbano had Catarella ring up the commissioner’s office. He told Dr. Lattes he wouldn’t be coming; the thing he had to tell him was of little importance, no importance at all.

  After phoning, he felt the need for some sea air. Passing by the switchboard, he said to Catarella:

  “Now run off and report to Inspector Augello.”

  Catarella looked at him like a beaten dog.

  “Why do you wanna insult me, Chief?”

  Insult him. Everyone was feeling insulted by him, but he wasn’t allowed to feel insulted by anyone.

  All of a sudden he couldn’t stand to lie in bed another minute, hashing and rehashing the words he’d exchanged with Mimì over the last few days. Hadn’t he communicated his decision to Livia? What was done was done. He turned towards the window. A faint light filtered in. The clock said a few minutes before six. He got up and opened the shutters. To the east, the glow of the imminent sunrise sketched arabesques of wispy, rainless clouds. The sea was a little stirred up by the morning breeze. He let the air fill his lungs, feeling a bit of his treacherous night being carried off with each exhalation. He went in the kitchen, filled the coffee pot and, while waiting for it to boil, opened the doors to the veranda.

  The beach—at least as far as the eye could see through the haze—looked deserted by man and beast. He drank two cups of coffee, one right after the other, put on his swim trunks, and went down to the beach. The sand was wet and compacted; maybe it had rained during the night. At the water’s edge, he stuck his foot out. The water felt a lot less icy than he had feared. He advanced warily, cold shudders running up his spine. Why, at over fifty years of age, do I keep trying to do these stunts? he asked himself. I’ll probably end up with one of those colds that numbs my head and has me sneezing for a week.

  He began swimming in slow, broad strokes. The sea smelled harsh, stinging his nostrils like champagne, and he nearly got drunk on it. Montalbano kept swimming and swimming, his head finally free of all thought, happy to have turned into a kind of mechanical doll. He was jolted back to human reality when a cramp suddenly bit into his left calf. Cursing the saints, he flipped onto his back and did the dead man’s float. The pain was so sharp that it made him grit his teeth. Sooner or later it would pass. These damned cramps had become more frequent in the last two or three years. Signs of old age lurking round the corner? The current carried him lazily along. The pain was starting to abate, and this allowed him to take two armstrokes backwards. At the end of the second stroke, his hand struck something.

  In a fraction of a second, Montalbano realized he’d struck a human foot. Somebody else was floating right beside him, and he hadn’t noticed.

  “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, Mont
albano 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.