The Potter's Field

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 entirely. 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.