Andrea Camilleri - Rounding the Mark

It was a lie. He did not feel tired. In fact he felt eager to get down to work. But he had to get rid of Ingrid as soon as possible. He didnt have a minute to lose. He managed to dispatch her without betraying his haste, thanking her and kissing her and promising theyd meet again the following Saturday. Once he was alone at home in Marinella, the inspector turned into one of those high-speed heroes in old slapstick movies, shooting like a rocket from room to room in a desperate search. Where the hell had he put that wet suit after hed last used it to look for the ragioniere Garganos car at the bottom of the sea a good two years back? He turned the house upside down and finally found it in an inner drawer of the armoire, properly wrapped in plastic. But what really drove him crazy was that he couldnt find a pistol holster that he practically never used but which nevertheless had to be somewhere. In fact, it turned out to be in the bathroom, inside the shoe rack, under a pair of slippers he had never dreamed of wearing. Hiding it there must have been a brilliant idea of Adelinas. The house now looked like it had been ransacked by a bunch of wine-plastered lansquenets. He had probably best not cross paths in the morning with his housekeeper, who would be in a bad mood when she saw how much work he had made for her.

He undressed, put on the wet suit, passed the belt through the holsters loop, then put only his jeans and jacket back on. Passing in front of a mirror, he caught a glimpse of himself. First he felt like laughing, then he felt embarrassed. He looked dressed up for a movie. What was this, Carnival or something?

The names Bond. James Bond, he said to his reflection.

He consoled himself with the thought that at this hour he wouldnt run into anyone he knew. He put the espresso pot on the burner, and when the coffee was ready, he knocked back three cups in a row. Before going out, he looked at his watch. At a rough guess, he would be back in Spigonella by two oclock in the morning.

He was so lucid and determined that on his very first try he found the road Ingrid had taken, which led to the spot from where one could see the front of the villa. The last hundred yards he had to drive without headlights. His only fear was that he might drive the car straight into the goddamned sea. He pulled up behind the Moorish-style bungalow perched at the edge of the cliff, turned off the motor, grabbed his binoculars, and got out. He leaned forward to look. There was no light visible in the windows. The villa looked uninhabited, and yet there were three men inside. Very carefully, dragging his feet the way people do when they cant see very well, he advanced to the edge of the cliff and looked below. He couldnt see anything, but he could hear the sea, which sounded a little rough. With the binoculars he tried to see if there was any activity in the villas little harbor, but he could barely make out the darker shapes of the rocks.

To the right, about ten yards away, was a narrow, steep staircase, carved into the stone wall. Negotiating it would have been a task for an alpinist in broad daylight, let alone in the dead of night. But he had no choice; there was no other way to get down to the beach. He went back beside the car, slipped off his jeans and jacket, took out his pistol, opened the car door, threw his stuff inside, grabbed his underwater flashlight, took the keys from the glove compartment, closed the car door without a sound, and hid the keys by wedging them under the right rear tire. He fit the gun into the holster on his belt, slung the binoculars across his chest, and kept the flashlight in his hand. On the very first step, he stopped, trying to get a sense of the stairways configuration. He turned the flashlight on for a second and looked. He felt himself begin to sweat inside the wet suit: the steps went down almost vertically.

Flicking the flashlight very quickly on and off from time to time to see whether his foot would land on solid ground or merely plunge into the void, and meanwhile cursing, hesitating, staggering, slipping, grabbing onto roots sticking out from the rock face, regretting that he wasnt an ibex, deer, or even a lizard, he finally, when the Good Lord saw fit, felt cool sand under the soles of his feet. Hed made it.

He lay down on his back, panting heavily, and watched the stars. He stayed that way for a while, until the bellows in the place of his lungs slowly disappeared. He stood up and looked through the binoculars. The dark shapes of the rocks that broke up the beach and formed the villas little harbor looked to be about fifty yards away. He started walking, crouching down and hugging the rock face. Every few steps he would stop, ears pricked, eyes as wide open as possible. Nothing. Total silence. All was still except the sea.

When he was almost behind the rocks, he looked up. All he could see of the villa was a kind of rectangular railing against the starry skyin other words, the underside of the vast terrace balcony at the point where it jutted out most. From here he couldnt advance any farther by land. He put the binoculars down on the sand, hooked the underwater flashlight onto his belt, took another step, and was in the water. He didnt expect it to be as deep as it was, coming immediately up to his chest. He figured this couldnt be a natural phenomenon; they must have dug into the sand to create a sort of moat, to add another obstacle for anyone on the beach who felt like climbing the rocks. He started swimming slowly, using a breaststroke, girl-style, to avoid even the slightest splashing, following the curve of that arm of the little harbor. The water was cold, and as he drew near the opening, the waves grew increasingly strong, threatening to send him scraping against some jagged rock. As there was now no longer any need to do the breaststrokesince any noise he might make would blend in with the sound of the seain four rapid crawl strokes he reached the last rock, the one marking the opening. He was leaning against it with his left hand, to catch his breath a moment, when a wave more powerful than the rest pushed him forward, knocking his feet against a very small natural platform. He climbed up on it, clinging to the rock with both hands. With each new wave he risked slipping, pulled down by the undertow. It was a dangerous spot, but before proceeding he had to get a few things straight.

According to his memory of the video, the other rock marking the entranceway should have been farther in, closer to shore, since the second arm of the little harbor described a large question mark, the upper curl of which ended with that very rock. Sticking his head out sidewise, he saw its shadow. He paused a moment to look; he wanted to make certain there was nobody keeping guard on the other side. When he was sure of this, he inched his feet ever so slowly to the edge of the natural platform, then again had to assume a precarious posture, standing and fully stretching out vertically so that his hand could blindly feel about for something metal, the small signal light hed managed to make out in the photographic enlargement. It took him a good five minutes to find it. It was higher up than it had looked to him in the photo. As a precaution, he ran his hand over it several times. He heard no alarm go off in the distance. So it wasnt an electric eye, but indeed a beacon turned off at that moment. He waited yet another minute for some sort of reaction, but when nothing at all happened, he dived back into the water. Halfway around the rock, his hand suddenly ran into the metal barrier preventing any surprise visits to the little harbor. Still groping, he ascertained that the barrier slid along a vertical rail that must be electronically controlled from inside the villa.

All that was left to do now was to go inside. He grabbed onto the barrier so he could hoist himself onto it and climb over it. Hed already got his left foot over when it happened. What it was, Montalbano couldnt quite say. The pain in the middle of his chest was so sudden, so sharp, and so unceasing that the inspector, collapsing while straddling the barrier, was convinced someone had shot him with an underwater rifle and made a direct hit. But at the same time he was thinking this, it became clear to him that he was wrong. He bit his lips to suppress the desperate wail he so wanted to let out, which might have provided some relief. Then he realized at once that the stabbing pain did not come from the outside, as he already obscurely knew, but from the insidefrom inside his body, where something had broken or was at the breaking point. It became very difficult to take a breath of air through his closed lips. Then suddenly, as quickly as it had appeared, the pain stopped, leaving him aching and numb, but not scared. Surprise had got the better of fear. He slid his buttocks along the top of the barrier until he could lean his shoulders against the rock. His sense of balance was no longer so precarious. He still had a chance and some time to recover from the malaise that the terrible bout of pain had left behind. But no, he had no chance and no time at all, as a second stab shot through his chest implacably, more ferocious than the first. He tried to control himself but couldnt. He hunched forward and started crying, eyes closed, weeping from pain and dejection, unable to distinguish the taste of his tears when they reached his mouth from the droplets of seawater trickling down from his hair. As the pain became a kind of hot drill boring into his flesh, he chanted to himself: