“You bring the car inside,” said Montalbano, getting out and starting to raise the metal grating of the police garage. Once she’d pulled in, he turned on the lights and lowered the grate.

  “What do you want me to do?” Ingrid asked.

  “See that wrecked Fiat 500 over there? I want to know if its brakes have been tampered with.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell.”

  “Try.”

  “There goes my blouse.”

  “No, wait. I brought something.”

  He reached into the backseat of his car and pulled out a shirt and pair of jeans that belonged to him.

  “Here. Put these on.”

  While Ingrid was changing, he went to look for a portable mechanic’s lamp, found one on the counter, and plugged it in. Without saying a word, Ingrid took the lamp, a monkey wrench, and a screwdriver and slid under the little Fiat’s twisted chassis. It took her only about ten minutes. She came out from under the car covered with dust and grease.

  “I was lucky. The brake cable was partly cut, I’m sure of it.”

  “What do you mean ‘partly’?”

  “I mean, it wasn’t cut all the way through. They left just enough so the car wouldn’t crash right away. But with the first hard pull, the cable would certainly have snapped.”

  “Are you positive it didn’t break all by itself? It was a very old car.”

  “The cut is too clean. There’s no shredding. Or very little.”

  “Now listen closely,” said Montalbano. “The man who was at the wheel drove from Vigàta to Montelusa, stopped there a little while, then headed back to Vigàta. The accident occurred on the steep descent right before you come into town, the Catena hillside. He slammed straight into a truck, and that was that. Clear so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I want to know is this: in your opinion, was this slick little job done in Vigàta or in Montelusa?”

  “In Montelusa,” said Ingrid. “If they’d done it in Vigàta, he would definitely have crashed much sooner. Anything else?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  Ingrid didn’t change her clothes, and didn’t even wash her hands.

  “I’ll do it at your house.”

  Ingrid got out in the bar’s parking lot, took her car, and followed the inspector. It was a warm evening, not yet midnight.

  “You want to take a shower?” he asked her when they got to his place.

  “No, I’d rather go for a swim. I’ll shower later, if I feel like it.”

  She took off the grease-stained clothes of Montalbano’s that she was wearing and slipped out of her panties. The inspector meanwhile had to make some effort to reassume his much-suffered guise as spiritual adviser.

  “Come on. Take your clothes off and join me,” she said.

  “No. I like watching you from the veranda.”

  The full moon was actually too bright. Montalbano remained in his deck chair, enjoying the sight of Ingrid’s silhouette as she reached the water’s edge and began a dance of little hops in the water, arms extended. He saw her dive in, following awhile the small black dot that was her head, and then, suddenly, he fell asleep.

  When he awoke, day was already dawning. He got up, slightly chilled, made coffee and drank three cups in a row. Before leaving, Ingrid had cleaned the house: there was no trace of her having been there. Ingrid was worth her weight in gold: she’d done everything he’d asked of her and hadn’t even wanted an explanation. As far as curiosity was concerned, she was certainly not female. But only as far as curiosity was concerned.

  Feeling a pang of hunger, he opened the refrigerator. The eggplant Parmesan he hadn’t eaten at lunchtime was gone, dispatched by Ingrid. He had to content himself with a piece of bread and some processed cheese. Better than nothing. He took a shower and put on the clothes he had lent to Ingrid. They still bore a trace of her scent.

  As was his habit, he arrived at headquarters about ten minutes late. His men were all ready with one squad car and the Jeep on loan from Vinti’s, which was loaded up with shovels, mattocks, pickaxes, and spades. They looked like laborers on their way to earn a day’s pay working the land.

  The Crasto mountain, which for its part would never have dreamed of calling itself a mountain, was a rather bald little hill that rose up west of Vigàta barely five hundred yards from the sea. It had been carefully pierced by a tunnel, now boarded up, that was supposed to have been an integral part of a road that started nowhere and led nowhere, a very useful bypass route for diverting funds into bottomless pockets. It was, in fact, called “the bypass.” Legend had it that deep in the mountain’s bowels was a crasto, a ram, made of solid gold. The tunnel-diggers never found it, but those who won the bid for the government contract certainly did. Attached to the mountain, on the landward side, was a kind of stronghold of rock called the Crasticeddru, the “little Crasto.” The earthmovers and trucks had never reached this area, and it preserved an untamed beauty.

  Having come down some impassable roads to avoid attracting attention, the two cars headed straight for the Crasticeddru. In the absence of any further path or trail, it was very hard to go on, but the inspector insisted that the cars pull right up to the foot of the rocky spur.

  Montalbano ordered everyone out of the cars. The air was cool, the morning bright.

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Fazio.

  “Search the Crasticeddru, all of you, very carefully. Look everywhere, and look hard. There’s supposed to be an entrance to a cave somewhere. It’s been covered up, camouflaged by rocks or vegetation. Keep your eyes peeled. We have to find it. I assure you it’s there.”

  They fanned out.

  Two hours later, discouraged, they met back up beside the cars. The sun was beating down, they were sweating, but farsighted Fazio had brought along thermoses of coffee and tea.

  “Let’s try again,” said Montalbano. “But don’t look only around the rock; search also along the ground, you might see something that looks fishy.”

  They resumed their hunt, and half an hour later Montalbano heard Galluzzo call from afar.

  “Inspector! Inspector! Come here!”

  The inspector went over to the policeman, who had assigned himself the side of the spur closest to the highway that went to Fela.

  “Look.”

  Someone had tried to make them disappear, but at a certain point along the ground, there were clearly visible tracks left behind by a large truck.

  “They lead over there,” said Galluzzo, pointing to the rock face. As he was saying this, he suddenly stopped, mouth agape.

  “Jesus God!” said Montalbano.

  How had they managed not to see it before? There was a huge boulder placed in an odd position, with shoots of withered grass sticking out from behind. As Galluzzo was calling to his mates, the inspector ran towards the boulder, grabbed a tuft of sword grass and tugged hard. He almost fell backward: the clump had no roots. It had merely been stuck there with bunches of sorghum to camouflage the entrance to the cave.

  9

  The boulder was a great stone slab, roughly rectangular in shape, that appeared to be of a piece with the rock around it and rested on a sort of giant step, also rock. At a glance Montalbano determined that it was roughly six feet tall and about four and a half feet wide: moving it by hand was out of the question. And yet there had to be a way. Halfway up its right side, about four inches from the edge, was a perfectly natural-looking hole.

  “If this was an actual wooden door,” the inspector reasoned, “that opening would be at the right height for inserting a doorknob.”

  He took a pen out of his pocket and stuck it in the hole. The pen fit all the way inside, but when Montalbano was about to put it back in his pocket, he noticed that the pen had soiled his hand. He looked at his fingers, then smelled them.

  “That’s grease,” he said to Fazio, the only person remaining beside him.

  The other policemen had taken shelter in the shade. Gallo had found a clump of sheep’s sorrel and offered some to the others.

  “Suck the stalk,” he said, “it’s delicious and quenches your thirst.”

  Montalbano thought of the only possible solution.

  “Do we have a steel cable?”

  “Sure do, inside the Jeep.”

  “All right, then pull the car up here as close as you can.”

  As Fazio was walking away, the inspector, now convinced he’d found the proper expedient for moving the big slab, looked at the surrounding landscape with different eyes. If this was indeed the place that Tano the Greek had revealed to him on his deathbed, there must be some spot nearby from which one could keep it under surveillance. The area seemed deserted and remote; one would never have imagined that right behind the bluff, a few hundred yards away, was the highway with all its traffic. Not far from there, on a rise of dry, rocky terrain, was a minuscule cottage, a cube consisting of a single room. He called for some binoculars. The little structure’s wooden door, which was closed, looked solid. Next to the door, at the height of a man’s head, was a small window without shutters, protected by two crisscrossing iron bars. The cottage appeared uninhabited, and it was the only possible observation point in the vicinity. All the other houses were too far away. Still doubtful, he called to Galluzzo.

  “Go have a look at that little house. Do what you can to open the door, but don’t break it in. Be careful, we may need to use it. See if there are any recent signs of life inside, if anyone’s been living there in the last few days. But leave everything exactly as it was, as if you’d never been there.”

  The Jeep had meanwhile backed almost all the way up to the base of the boulder. The inspector took the end of the steel cable, inserted it easily into the hole and started pushing it inside. This required little effort, for the cable slid into the boulder as if following a well-greased, unobstructed groove. In fact, a few seconds later, the cable end popped out on the other side of the slab, looking like the head of a snake.

  “Take this end,” Montalbano told Fazio, “affix it to the Jeep, put the car in gear and pull away, but very, very gently.”

  As the Jeep began to move, so did the boulder, its right side starting to come detached from the rock face as if turning on invisible hinges.

  “Open sesame . . .” Germanà murmured in amazement, recalling the children’s formula that magically served to open all doors.

  “I assure you, Commissioner, that stone slab was turned into a door by a superb master craftsman. Just imagine, the iron hinges were totally invisible from the outside. Reclosing the door was as easy as opening it. We went in with flashlights. Inside, the cave was very carefully and intelligently fitted out. They’d made a floor, for example, out of a dozen or so puncheons nailed together and set down on the bare earth.”

  “What’s a puncheon?”

  “I can’t think of the proper word. Let’s just say they’re very thick planks. They built a floor to keep the crates of weapons from coming into direct contact with the damp ground. The walls are covered with lighter boards. The whole inside of the cave is a sort of giant wooden box without a top. They obviously worked a long time on it.”

  “What about the weapons?”

  “A veritable arsenal. About thirty machine guns and submachine guns, a hundred or so pistols and revolvers, two bazookas, thousands of ammunition rounds, cases of every kind of explosive, from TNT to Semtex. And a large quantity of police and carabinieri uniforms, bulletproof vests, and various other things. All in perfect order, with each item wrapped in cellophane.”

  “We’ve really dealt them a serious blow, eh?”

  “Absolutely. Tano avenged himself well, just enough to avoid looking like a traitor or repenter. I want you to know that I didn’t sequester the weapons; I left them in the cave. I’ve arranged for my men to stand guard, in two shifts, round the clock. They’re in an uninhabited cottage a few hundred yards away from the arms depot.”

  “You’re hoping someone will come for supplies?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Good, I agree with that. We’ll wait a week, keep everything under close watch, and if nothing happens, we’ll go ahead with the seizure. Ah, Montalbano, do you remember my dinner invitation for day after tomorrow?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone it a few days. My wife has the flu . . .”

  There was no need to wait a week. The third day after they had discovered the weapons, Catarella, having completed his midnight-to-midday shift on guard, went to report to Montalbano, asleep on his feet. The inspector had asked them all to do the same as soon as they went off duty.

  “Any news?”

  “Nothing, Chief. All peacefulness and quietude.”

  “Good. Actually, bad. Go get some sleep.”

  “Uh, wait. Now that I put my head to it, there was something, nothing, really, I just thought I’d tell you more out of consciousness than duty, but it’s nothing.”

  “What kind of nothing?”

  “A tourist came by.”

  “Explain a little better, Cat.”

  “It looked to be around twenty-one hundred hours in the morning.”

  “If it was morning, it was nine, Cat.”

  “Whatever you say. Then right then and there I heard the roar of a motorcycle. So I grabbed the binoculars around my neck and precautiously looked out the window for confirmation. The motorcycle was red.”

  “The color is of no importance. Then what?”

  “Then a tourist of the male sex descended from off said motorcycle.”

  “What made you think he was a tourist?”

  “He was wearing a camera around his neck, a really big camera, so big it looked like a cannon.”

  “Must have been a telephoto lens.”

  “Yessir, that it was. Then he started taking telephotos.”

  “Of what?”

  “Everything, Chief, everything. The countryside, the Crasticeddru, even the location I was located in.”

  “Did he get close to the Crasticeddru?”

  “Never, sir. But when he climbed back on his motorcycle to leave, he waved at me with his hands.”

  “He saw you?”

  “No. I stayed inside the whole time. But as I was saying, once he started up, he waved good-bye to the little house.”

  “Commissioner? I’ve got some news, and it’s not good. Looks like they somehow got wind of our discovery and sent somebody on reconnaissance to confirm.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “This morning the man on duty in the cottage saw some guy arrive on a motorcycle and take photographs of the whole area with a powerful telephoto. They must have set up a very specific marker around the boulder blocking the entrance, like, say, a stick pointing in a certain direction, a rock placed a certain distance away . . . It simply would not have been possible for us to put everything back exactly the way it was.”

  “Excuse me, but had you given precise instructions to the officer on duty?”

  “Of course. The man on duty should have stopped the motorcyclist, identified him, confiscated the camera, and brought him to the station . . .”

  “So why didn’t he?”

  “For one very simple reason: the officer was Catarella, whom we both know well.”

  “Ah,” was the commissioner’s laconic reply.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We’ll go ahead and sequester the arms immediately, today. Palermo has ordered me to give it maximum coverage.”

  Montalbano felt his armpits getting soaked in sweat.

  “Another press conference?”

  “I’m afraid so. Sorry.”

  As he was about to leave for the Crasticeddru with two cars and a van, Montalbano noticed Galluzzo imploring him with his eyes, like a battered dog. He called him aside.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Think I could invite my brother-in-law, the newsman?”

  “No,” Montalbano said at once, but he immediately reconsidered. Another idea had come into his mind, and he felt very pleased with himself for having thought of it. “Listen,” he said, “okay, as a favor to you. Give him a call and tell him to come.”

  The idea was that if Galluzzo’s brother-in-law was there on the spot and gave the discovery sufficient publicity, the need for the press conference might just go up in smoke.

  Montalbano not only allowed Galluzzo’s brother-in-law and his TeleVigàta cameraman a free hand; he actually helped them stage their scoop by acting as director. He had his men assemble a bazooka, which Fazio then mounted on his shoulder as if to fire, then had the cave brightly illuminated so that every cartridge clip, every magazine, could be filmed or photographed.

  After two hours of serious work, the cave was completely emptied of its cargo. The news reporter and his cameraman raced off to Montelusa to edit their feature, and Montalbano called the commissioner on a cell phone.

  “It’s all loaded up.”

  “Good. Send it here to me, in Montelusa. And one more thing: leave a man on duty. Jacomuzzi will soon be there with the crime lab team. Congratulations.”

  It was Jacomuzzi, in the end, who took care of setting the idea of the press conference definitively to rest. Wholly involuntarily, of course, since Jacomuzzi was blissfully in his element in press conferences and interviews. In fact, before coming to the cave to gather evidence, the crime lab chief had taken the trouble to alert some twenty journalists from the press and television. Thus, while the report put together by Galluzzo’s brother-in-law quickly reverberated in the local news, the commotion unleashed by the stories on Jacomuzzi and his men had national resonance. The commissioner—as Montalbano had correctly foreseen—decided to call off the press conference, since everyone already knew everything, and settled for issuing a detailed press release instead.