The Potter's Field

She didn’t seem real. She was stunning, about thirty, dark and very tall, with long hair falling over her shoulders, big, deep eyes, a broad mouth, full lips siliconized not by a surgeon but by Mother Nature herself, perfect teeth for eating living flesh, and big hoop earrings, like a gypsy. Also gypsylike were her skirt and a blouse that swelled with two international-tournament-size bocce balls.

She didn’t seem real, but she was. Man, was she ever real.

Montalbano had the impression he’d already met her somewhere, but then realized that it was because she looked like a Mexican movie actress from the fifties he’d seen in a recent retrospective.

When she entered, the office filled with a faint scent of cinnamon.

But it wasn’t perfume that gave off that scent, the inspector thought. It was her skin. As she held out her hand to him, Montalbano noticed that she had extremely long fingers, disproportionately long, fascinating and dangerous.

They sat down, she in front, he behind the desk. The woman had a serious, worried air about her.

“What can I do for you, signora . . . ?”

“My name is Dolores Alfano.”

Montalbano sprang up towards the ceiling, and on his way back down, his left butt-cheek landed on the edge of the chair and he very nearly disappeared behind the desk. Dolores Alfano seemed not to notice.

So here, at last, personally in person, was the mysterious woman Fabio Giacchetti had talked to him about, the woman who, returning from an amorous tryst, nearly got run over by someone, perhaps on purpose.

“But Alfano is my husband Giovanni’s surname,” she continued. “My maiden name is Gutierrez.”

“Are you Spanish?”

“No, Colombian. But I’ve been living in Vigàta for years, at Via Guttuso, 12.”

“So, what can I do for you, signora?” Montalbano repeated.

“My husband is away at sea, sailing on a container ship as first mate. We stay in touch through letters and postcards. Before leaving, he always gives me a list of his ports of call with arrival and departure dates, so he can receive my letters when he goes ashore. We also sometimes call each other with our satellite phones, but pretty rarely.”

“Has something happened?”

“Well, Giovanni embarked a few months ago on a rather long voyage, and after three weeks had gone by, he still hadn’t written or phoned me. This has never happened before. So I got worried and called him. He told me he was in good health and had been very busy.”

Montalbano was spellbound as he listened to her. She had a bedroom voice. There was no other way to define it. She might say only “hello,” and immediately one imagined rumpled blankets, pillows on the floor, and sweat-dampened sheets smelling of cinnamon.

And the Spanish accent that came out when she spoke at length was like a spicy condiment.

“. . . a postcard from him,” said Dolores.

Lost in her voice, Montalbano had become distracted, his mind indeed on unmade beds and torrid nights, with perhaps some Spanish guitars playing in the background...

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” he said.

“I said that the day before yesterday, I got a postcard from him.”

“Good. So now you’ve been reassured.”

The woman did not reply, but pulled a picture postcard out of her purse and handed it to the inspector.

It showed the port of a town that Montalbano had never heard of. The stamp was Argentinean. On the back was written : Doing great. How about you? Kisses, Giovanni.

You couldn’t very well say the captain was an expansive sort. Still, it was better than nothing. Montalbano looked up at Dolores Alfano.

“I don’t think he wrote it himself,” she said. “The signature looks different to me.”

She took four other postcards out of her purse and passed them to Montalbano.

“Compare it with these, which he sent me last year.”

There was no need to resort to a handwriting expert. It was glaringly obvious that the handwriting of the last postcard was fake. And falsified rather carelessly at that. The old postcards also had a different tone:

I love you so much

Think of you always

I miss you

I kiss you all over

“This last postcard I received,” Dolores continued, “brought back the strange impression I had after calling him on the phone.”

“Which was?”

“That it wasn’t him at the other end. His voice was different. As if he had a cold. But at the time I convinced myself that it was because of the distortion of the cell phone. Now I’m no longer so sure.”

“And what do you think I should do?”

“Well . . . I don’t really know.”

“It’s sort of a problem, signora. The last postcard wasn’t written by him, you’re right about that. But that might also mean your husband didn’t board the ship for any number of reasons and then had a friend write to you and send it so you wouldn’t get worried.”

Dolores shook her head.

“In that case, he could have telephoned me.”

“True. Why didn’t you call him?”