The Shape of Water

by Andrea Camilleri

  Before going out—he lived alone in a small house right on the beach on the opposite side of town from the Pasture—he felt like calling Livia in Genoa. She answered immediately, drowsy with sleep.

  “Sorry, but I wanted to hear your voice.”

  “I was dreaming of you,” she said. “You were here with me.”

  Montalbano was about to say that he, too, had been dreaming of her, but an absurd prudishness held him back. Instead he asked:

  “And what were we doing?”

  “Something we haven’t done for too long,” she said.

  ~

  At headquarters, aside from the sergeant, there were only three policemen. The rest had gone to the home of a clothing-shop owner who had shot his sister over a question of inheritance and then escaped. Montalbano opened the door to the interrogation room. The two garbage collectors were sitting on the bench, huddling one against the other, pale despite the heat.

  “Wait here till I get back,” Montalbano said to them, and the two, resigned, didn’t even reply. They both knew well that any time one fell in with the law, whatever the reason, it was going to be a long affair.

  “Have any of you called the papers?” the inspector asked his men. They shook their heads no.

  “Well, I don’t want them sticking their noses in this. Make a note of that.”

  Timidly, Galluzzo came forward, raising two fingers as if to ask if he could go to the bathroom.

  “Not even my brother-in-law?”

  Galluzzo’s brother-in-law was a newsman with TeleVigàta who covered local crime, and Montalbano imagined the family squabbles that might break out if Galluzzo weren’t to tell him anything. And Galluzzo was looking at him with pitiful, canine eyes.

  “All right. But he should come only after the body’s been removed. And no photographers.”

  They set out in a squad car, leaving Giallombardo behind on duty. Gallo was at the wheel. Together with Galluzzo, he was often the butt of facile jokes, such as

  “Hey, Inspector, what’s new in the chicken coop?”

  Knowing Gallo’s driving habits, Montalbano admonished him, “Don’t speed. We’re in no hurry.”

  At the curve by the Carmelite church, Peppe Gallo could no longer restrain himself and accelerated, screeching the tires as he rounded the bend. They heard a loud crack, like a pistol shot, and the car skidded to a halt. They got out. The right rear tire hung flabbily, blown out. It had been well worked over by a sharp blade; the cuts were quite visible.

  “Goddamn sons of bitches!” bellowed the sergeant.

  Montalbano got angry in earnest.

  “But you all know they cut our tires twice a month! Jesus! And every morning I remind you: don’t forget to check them before going out! But you assholes don’t give a shit! And you won’t until the day somebody breaks his neck!”

  For one reason or another, it took a good ten minutes to change the tire, and when they got to the Pasture, the Montelusa crime lab team was already there. They were in what Montalbano called the meditative stage, that is, five or six agents circling round and round the spot where the car stood, hands usually in their pockets or behind their backs. They looked like philosophers absorbed in deep thought, but in fact their eyes were combing the ground for clues, traces, footprints. As soon as Jacomuzzi, head of the crime lab, saw Montalbano, he came running up.

  “How come there aren’t any newsmen?”

  “I didn’t want any.”

  “Well, this time they’re going to accuse you of trying to cover up a big story.” He was clearly upset.

  “Do you know who the dead man is?”

  “No. Who?”

  “None other than ‘the engineer,’ Silvio Luparello.”

  “Shit!” was Montalbano’s only comment.

  “And do you know how he died?”

  “No. And I don’t want to know. I’ll have a look at him myself.”

  Offended, Jacomuzzi went back to his men. The lab photographer had finished, and now it was Dr.

  Pasquano’s turn. Montalbano noticed that the coroner was forced to work in an uncomfortable position, his body half inside the car, wiggling his way toward the passenger seat, where a dark silhouette could be seen.

  Fazio and the Vigàta officers were giving a hand to their Montelusa colleagues. The inspector lit a cigarette and turned to look at the chemical factory. That ruin fascinated him. He decided he would come back one day to take a few snapshots, which he’d send to Livia to explain some things about himself and his island that she was still unable to understand.

  Lo Bianco’s car pulled up and the judge stepped out, looking agitated.

  “Is it really Luparello?” he asked.

  Apparently Jacomuzzi had wasted no time.

  “So it seems.”

  The judge joined the lab group and began speaking excitedly with Jacomuzzi and Dr. Pasquano, who in the meantime had extracted a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his briefcase and was disinfecting his hands. After a good while, long enough for Montalbano to broil in the sun, the men from the lab got back in their cars and left. As he passed Montalbano, Jacomuzzi said nothing. Behind him, the inspector heard an ambulance siren wind down. It was his turn now. He’d have to do the talking and acting; there was no escape. He shook himself from the torpor in which he was stewing and walked toward the car with the dead man inside. Halfway there, the judge blocked his path.

  “The body can be removed now. And considering poor Luparello’s notoriety, the quicker we do it the better. In any case, keep me posted daily as to how the investigation develops.”

  He paused a moment, and then, to make the words he’d just said a little less peremptory:

  “Give me a ring when you think it’s appropriate,”

  he added.

  Another pause. Then:

  “During office hours, of course.”

  He walked away. During office hours, not at home.

  At home, it was well known, Judge Lo Bianco was busy penning a stuffy, puffy book, The Life and Exploits of Rinaldo and Antonio Lo Bianco, Masters of Jurisprudence at the University of Girgenti at the Time of King Martin the Younger (1402–1409). These Lo Biancos, he claimed, however nebulously, were his ancestors.

  “How did he die?” he asked the doctor.

  “See for yourself,” said the doctor, standing aside.

  Montalbano stuck his head inside the car, which felt like an oven (more specifically, a crematorium), took his first look at the corpse, and immediately thought of the police commissioner.

  He thought of the commissioner not because he was in the habit of turning his thoughts up the hierarchical ladder at the start of every investigation, but merely because some ten days earlier he had spoken with old Commissioner Burlando, who was a friend of his, about a book by Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death, which they had both read. The commissioner had argued that every death, even the most abject, was sacred. Montalbano had retorted, in all sincerity, that in no death, not even a pope’s, could he see anything sacred whatsover.

  He wished the commissioner were there beside him now, to see what he saw. This Luparello had always been an elegant sort, extremely well-groomed in every physical detail. Now, however, his tie was gone, his shirt rumpled, his glasses askew, his jacket collar incongruously half turned up, his socks sagging so flaccidly that they covered his loafers. But what most struck the inspector was the sight of the trousers pulled down around the man’s knees, the white of the underwear showing inside the trousers, the shirt rolled up together with the undershirt halfway up his chest.

  And the sex organ obscenely, horridly exposed, thick and hairy, in stark contrast with the meticulous care shown over the rest of his person.

  “But how did he die?” he asked the doctor again, coming out of the car.

  “Seems obvious, don’t you think?” Pasquano replied rudely. “You did know he’d had heart surgery,” he continued, “performed by a famous London surgeon?”

  “No, I did not. I saw him on T
V last Wednesday, and he looked in perfect health to me.”

  “He may have looked healthy, but he wasn’t. You know, in politics they’re all like dogs: the minute they realize you can’t defend yourself, they attack. Apparently he had a double bypass in London. They say it was a difficult operation.”

  “Who was his doctor in Montelusa?”

  “My colleague Capuano. He was getting weekly checkups. His health was very important to him—you know, always wanted to look fit.”

  “You think I should talk to Capuano?”

  “Absolutely unnecessary. It’s plain as day what happened here. Poor Mr. Luparello felt like having a good lay in the Pasture, maybe with some exotic foreign slut, and he had it, all right, and left his carcass behind.”

  He noticed that Montalbano had a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Not convinced?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. Can you send me the results of the autopsy tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?! Are you crazy? Before Luparello I’ve got that twenty-year-old girl who was raped in a shepherd’s hut and found eaten by dogs ten days later, and then there’s Fofò Greco, who had his tongue cut out and his balls cut off before they hung him from a tree to die, and then—”

  Montalbano cut this macabre list short.

  “Pasquano, let’s get to the point. When can you get me the results?”

  “Day after tomorrow, if in the meantime I don’t have to run all over town looking at other corpses.”

  They said good-bye. Montalbano called over the sergeant and his men and told them what they had to do and when to load the body into the ambulance. He had Gallo drive him back to headquarters.

  “You can go back afterward and pick up the others. And if you speed, I’ll break your neck.”

  ~

  Pino and Saro signed the sworn statement. In it their every movement before and after they discovered the body was described. But it neglected to mention two important things, which the garbage collectors had been careful not to reveal to the law. The first was that they had almost immediately recognized the dead man, the second that they had hastened to inform the lawyer Rizzo of their discovery. They headed back home, Pino apparently with his thoughts elsewhere, Saro now and again touching the pocket that still held the necklace.

  Nothing would happen for at least another twenty-four hours. In the afternoon Montalbano went back to his house, threw himself down on the bed, and fell into a three-hour sleep. When he woke, as the mid-September sea was flat as a mirror, he went for a long swim. Back inside, he made himself a dish of spaghetti with a sauce of sea urchin pulp and turned on the television. Naturally, all the local news programs were talking about Luparello’s death. They sang his praises, and from time to time a politician would appear, with a face to fit the occasion, and enumerate the merits of the deceased and the problems created by his passing. But not a single one of them, not even the news program of the opposition’s channel, dared to mention where and in what circumstances the late lamented Luparello had met his end.

  3

  Saro and Tana had a bad night. There was no doubt Saro had discovered a secret treasure, the kind told about in tales where vagabond shepherds stumble upon ancient jars full of gold coins or find little lambs covered in diamonds. But here the matter was not at all as in olden times: the necklace, of modern construction, had been lost the day before, this much was certain, and by anyone’s guess it was worth a fortune.

  Was it possible nobody had come forward to declare it missing? As they sat at their small kitchen table, with the television on and the window wide open, like every night, to keep the neighbors from getting nosy and gossiping at the sight of the slightest change, Tana wasted no time opposing her husband’s intention to go and sell it that very day, as soon as the Siracusa brothers’ jewelry shop reopened.

  “First of all,” she said, “we’re honest people. We can’t just go and sell something that’s not ours.”

  “But what are we supposed to do? You want me to go to the foreman and tell him I found a necklace, turn it over to him, and have him give it back to its owner when they come to reclaim it? That bastard Pecorilla’ll sell it himself in ten seconds flat.”

  “We could do something else. We could keep the necklace at home and in the meantime tell Pecorilla about it. Then if somebody comes for it, we’ll give it to them.”

  “What good will that do us?”

  “There’s supposed to be a percentage for people who find things like this. How much do you think it’s worth?”

  “Twenty million lire, easy,” Saro replied, immediately thinking he’d blurted out too high a figure.

  “So let’s say we get two million. Can you tell me how we’re going to pay for all of Nenè’s treatments with two million lire?”

  They talked it over until dawn and only stopped because Saro had to go to work. But they’d reached a temporary agreement that allowed their honesty to remain intact: they would hang on to the necklace without whispering a word to anyone, let a week go by, and then, if nobody came forward, they’d pawn it.

  When Saro, washed up and ready to leave, went to kiss his son, he had a surprise: Nenè was sleeping deeply, peacefully, as if he somehow knew that his father had found a way to make him well.

  ~

  Pino couldn’t sleep that night either. Speculative by nature, he liked the theater and had acted in several well-meaning but increasingly rare amateur productions in and around Vigàta. So he read theatrical literature. As soon as his meager earnings would allow him, he would rush off to Montelusa’s only bookstore and buy his fill of comedies and dramas. He lived with his mother, who had a small pension, and getting food on the table was not really a problem. Over dinner his mother had made him tell her three times how he discovered the corpse, asking him each time to better explain a certain detail or circumstance. She’d done this so that she could retell the whole story the next day to her friends at church or at the market, proud to be privy to such knowledge and to have a son so clever as to get himself involved in such an important affair. Finally, around midnight, she’d gone to bed, and shortly thereafter Pino turned in as well. As for sleeping, however, there was no chance of that; something made him toss and turn under the sheets. He was speculative by nature, as we said, and thus, after wasting two hours trying to shut his eyes, he’d convinced himself it was no use, it might as well be Christmas Eve. He got up, washed his face, and went to sit at the little desk he had in his bedroom. He repeated to himself the story he had told his mother, and although every detail fit and it all made sense, the buzz in his head was still there, in the background. It was like the “hot-cold” guessing game: as long as he was reviewing everything he’d said, the buzz seemed to be saying,“You’re cold.” Thus the static must be coming from something he’d neglected to tell his mother. And in fact what he hadn’t told her were the same things he, by agreement with Saro, had kept from Inspector Montalbano: their immediate recognition of the corpse and the phone call to Rizzo. And here the buzz became very loud and screamed, “You’re hot hot hot!” So he took a pen and paper and wrote down word for word the conversation he’d had with the lawyer. He reread it and made some corrections, forcing himself to remember even the pauses, which he wrote in, as in a theatrical script. When he had got it all down, he reread the final draft. Something in that dialogue still didn’t work. But it was too late now; he had to go to Splendor.

  ~

  Around ten o’clock in the morning, Montalbano’s reading of the two Sicilian dailies, one from Palermo and the other from Catania, was interrupted by a phone call from the commissioner.

  “I was told to send you thanks,” the commissioner began.

  “Oh, really? On whose behalf ?”

  “On behalf of the bishop and our minister. Monsignor Teruzzi was pleased with the Christian charity—those were his exact words—which you, how shall I say, put into action by not allowing any u
nscrupulous, indecent journalists and photographers to paint and propagate lewd portraits of the deceased.”

  “But I gave that order before I even knew who it was! I would have done the same for anybody.”

  “I’m aware of that; Jacomuzzi told me everything.

  But why should I have revealed such an irrelevant detail to our holy prelate? Why should I disabuse him, or you, of your Christian charity? Such charity, my dear man, becomes all the more precious the loftier the position of the object of charity, you know what I mean?

  Just imagine, the bishop even quoted Pirandello.”

  “No!”

  “Oh, yes. He quoted Six Characters in Search of an Author, the line where the father says that one cannot be held forever to a less-than-honorable act, after a life of great integrity, just because of one moment of weakness. In other words, we cannot pass on to posterity the image of Luparello with his pants momentarily down.”

  “What did the minister say?”

  “He certainly didn’t quote Pirandello, since he wouldn’t even know who that is, but the idea, however tortuous and mumbled, was the same. And since he belongs to the same party as Luparello, he took the trouble to add another word.”

  “What was that?”

  “Prudence.”

  “What’s prudence got to do with this business?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s the word he used.”

  “Any news of the autopsy?”

  “Not yet. Pasquano wanted to keep him in the fridge until tomorrow, but I talked him into examining him late this morning or early in the afternoon. I don’t think we’re going to learn anything new from that end, though.”