Andrea Camilleri - The Dance of the Seagull

And so G does and says what he has to do and say, and succeeds in getting invited a first time to the house in Via Bixio. As they say in novels about love—the kind that book reviewers like so much—the old flame was rekindled. The two made love, and G promised to come back the following night.

Which he does, and when Manzella falls asleep, exhausted, G picks up his clothes, goes downstairs very quietly, opens the door, lets in Carmona and Sorrentino, whom he’d alerted beforehand, and leaves. He’s done what he was supposed to do, and so they let him go free.

Could I make a parenthetical comment here? the inspector asked himself.

Permission granted, he commented:

There are two possibilities: either G is a fool, believes the promise, and remains in Vigàta—and in this case we’ll soon find his bullet-riddled body abandoned somewhere—or else he’s shrewd and by now has already flown to northern Greenland, an area that, as everybody knows, has not yet been penetrated by the Sicilian Mafia, since it’s too cold up there.

End of parenthesis.

Carmona and Sorrentino go upstairs, wake Manzella up, and force him downstairs, naked as the day he was born. They don’t even let him put on his slippers, which were, in fact, still on the floor beside the bed.

And this meant that the moment had come, willy-nilly, for Montalbano, too, to go into the living room.

He stopped on the landing at the top of the stairs, counting the steps. There were sixteen.

He wished he had his pistol in his hand. Even though he knew it would have been useless, since there was nothing to shoot at. He felt the hair on his arms stand on end, as when one brushes past a television set that has just been turned off, no matter how hard he tried to control himself and kept repeating in his mind that there was nobody waiting for him in the living room . . .

Of course there was nobody! Nobody in flesh and blood, that is. What was this bullshit, anyway? What was he afraid of, a ghost? A shade? So he was starting to believe in ghosts at age fifty-seven and counting?

He descended two stairs.

A window shutter slammed hard, and he jumped in the air like a startled cat, so spooked he nearly lost his grip of the banister.

The wind had picked up.

With eyes closed, he dashed down the next four stairs. But then he suddenly lost heart and descended two more stairs, gripping the banister tightly and sliding his foot until it found emptiness, then slowly raising his leg and setting the sole of his shoe down lightly on the step below, exactly like someone partly or totally blind.

But what the hell was all this tension? He’d never felt this way before. Was it some sort of nasty joke of old age?

This time the shutters of the living-room windows slammed with a loud boom and closed simultaneously. Now the room downstairs was in darkness again.

How was that possible? the inspector wondered. If the wind was blowing from one direction, how could both windows slam shut at the same time?

He suddenly understood that there actually was someone waiting for him in the living room.

Someone who had the same body and face as him, and who had the same name: Salvo Montalbano. He himself was the invisible enemy he would have to face. The enemy who would force him to relive what had happened in that room, down to the smallest details . . .

Relive? Wrong word. He hadn’t witnessed Manzella’s slow, painful death. How, then, could he relive it? And, anyway, after all the murders of which he’d seen so many vestiges that it was sometimes more upsetting than if he’d witnessed the murders themselves, why did this one have such a strong effect on him?

He would never get out of this situation unless he saw it through to the end, of that he was immediately certain.

And for this reason, he began descending the remaining stairs with as decisive a step as he could muster.

He stopped again at the bottom of the staircase.

The room was not completely in darkness. The shutters were closed, but through the slats filtered blades of gray light that cast the trembling shadows of the windblown leaves on the trees outside. He wanted neither to reopen the shutters nor to light the lamps, but only to stand still for a moment until his eyes slowly adjusted.

To make space for the show they were about to direct, Carmona and Sorrentino had pushed all the furniture up against the wall. A buffet that had once had a small ceramic fruit bowl on it, which was now on the floor, shattered to pieces. Three chairs. A sofa. A small dining table, a sideboard with dishes and glasses. A television set.

There were two milky white things on the floor, near the table, which he couldn’t quite identify.

It couldn’t be. He realized immediately what they were but refused to believe it. He looked at them more closely, needing to convince himself that he’d seen correctly, as the disorder in the pit of his stomach, a knot of dense liquid, bitter and burning, began to rise into his throat, bringing tears to his eyes.

He started looking around the chair in the middle of the room and the dark circle of blood surrounding it.

The floor was made of terracotta, and he noticed that one tile, right in front of the chair, had been freshly splintered. If he’d had a knife handy, he could easily have extracted the bullet that, after passing through Manzella’s foot, had shattered the tile and buried itself in the ground.

Mimì was right.

They’d taken him out of bed and down the stairs, moved the furniture out of the way except for the chair in the middle of the room, sat him down . . . No, first they . . . Go on, get it out, it’s better that way.

They started asking him—surely slapping him around, and kicking and punching—what he’d told Fazio . . .

But he could only give them one answer: that he’d only hinted at the matter with Fazio, and hadn’t named any names . . . And those guys didn’t believe him, and at some point decided to get more serious.

“You used to be a ballet dancer, right?”

“Yes.”

“So dance, then.”

And one of them shot him in the foot. Then they forced him to stand up on one leg, the one with the uninjured foot, and made him dance around the chair.

“C’mon, dance, dance, an’ don’ make any noise.”

And so Manzella hopped around the chair on one foot, naked, at once comical and terrifying, emitting desperate cries that no one could hear . . .

And the inspector saw him dancing as if he were in the room with the others. The danse macabre looked like a scene in a black-and-white film, in the quivering light filtering through the shutters . . .

At that moment, what Montalbano was fearing would happen, happened.

As he was imagining the scene in his head, little by little Manzella’s naked, bloodied body began to transform itself, becoming slowly more hairy, and the floor was no longer tiled but made of sand, exactly like the beach at Marinella . . .

In a sort of burst of light, a blinding flash, he found himself as on that morning, watching the seagull perform its dance of death.

The bird, however, was not emitting the heartrending cry he’d heard that day. It now had a human voice, that of Manzella begging for mercy and weeping . . .

And he heard, quite clearly, the laughter of the other two having a good time, as they had done before . . .

The seagull by this point was on the threshold of death.

Manzella had fallen to the floor, unable to remain standing any longer, writhing as he tried to raise his head.

The seagull was now waving its beak back and forth, as if wanting to put something in a spot too high to reach.

The two men then went up to Manzella, lifted him off the ground, and started dragging him about the room, working him over with the knife as the blood spattered all over the walls and furniture . . .