The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri Read Free Book Online

do I deserve to be promoted to assistant commissioner. If I were promoted, it would be for a lie, a deception.”
    â€œLet me be the judge of that,” the commissioner said brusquely.
    He got up, put his hands behind his back, and stood there thinking a moment. Then he made up his mind and turned around.
    â€œHere’s what we’ll do. Write me two reports.”
    â€œTwo?” said Montalbano, mindful of the effort it normally cost him to apply ink to paper.
    â€œDon’t argue. The fake report I’ll leave lying around for the inevitable mole who will make sure to leak it to the press or to the Mafia. The real one I’ll put in the safe.”
    He smiled.
    â€œAnd as for this promotion business, which seems to be what terrifies you most, come to my house on Friday evening and we’ll talk it over a little more calmly. My wife has invented a fabulous new sauce for sea bream.”
    Â 
 
Cavaliere Gerlando Misuraca, who carried his eighty-four years belligerently, was true to form, going immediately on the offensive as soon as the inspector said, “Hello?”
    â€œWho is that imbecile who transferred my call?”
    â€œWhy, what did he do?”
    â€œHe couldn’t understand my surname! He couldn’t get it into that thick head of his! ‘Bizugaga,’ he called me!”
    He paused warily, then changed his tone:
    â€œCan you assure me, on your word of honor, that he’s just some poor bastard who doesn’t know any better?”
    Realizing that it was Catarella who had answered the phone, Montalbano could reply with conviction.
    â€œI can assure you. But why, may I ask, do you need my assurance?”
    â€œBecause if he meant to make fun of me or what I represent, I’ll be down there at the station in five minutes and will give him such a thrashing, by God, he won’t be able to walk!”
    And just what did Cavaliere Misuraca represent? Montalbano wondered while the other continued threatening to do terrible things. Nothing, absolutely nothing from a, so to speak, official point of view. A municipal employee long since retired, he did not hold nor had he ever held any public office, being merely a card-carrying member of his party. A man of unassailable honesty, he lived a life of dignified quasi-poverty. Even in the days of Mussolini, he had refused to seek personal gain, having always been a “faithful follower,” as one used to say back then. In return, from 1935 onwards, he had fought in every war and been in the thick of the worst battles. He hadn’t missed a single one, and indeed seemed to have a gift for being everywhere at once, from Guadalajara, Spain, to Bir el Gobi in North Africa by way of Axum, Ethiopia. Followed by imprisonment in Texas, his refusal to cooperate, and an even harsher imprisonment as a result, on nothing but bread and water. He therefore represented, Montalbano concluded, the historical memory of what were, of course, historic mistakes, but he had lived them with a naïve faith and paid for them with his own skin: among several serious injuries, one had left him lame in his left leg.
    â€œTell me,” Montalbano had mischievously asked him one day face-to-face, “if you’d been able, would you have gone to fight at Salò, alongside the Germans and the repubblichini? ” In his way, the inspector was sort of fond of the old Fascist. How could he not be? In that circus of corrupters and corrupted, extortionists and grafters, bribe-takers, liars, thieves, and perjurers—turning up each day in new combinations—Montalbano had begun to feel a kind of affection for people he knew to be incurably honest.
    At this question, the old man had seemed to deflate from within, the wrinkles on his face multiplying as his eyes began to fog over. Montalbano then understood that Misuraca had asked himself the same question a thousand times and had never been able to come up with an answer. So he