IM11 The Wings of the Sphinx (2009) Read Online Free Page A

with nothing on it. And for a first course, if it’s not too much trouble, bring me a generous portion of spaghetti with clam sauce, white, that is.”
    That way, with no strong flavor of sauces in his mouth, he could better savor the langouste, dressed only with olive oil and lemon.
    As he was about to set to the langouste, images of the illegal dump appeared on the television screen. The cameraman framed the body, covered by a white sheet, from the clearing above.
    “A horrific crime . . . ,” began a voice off-camera.
    “Turn that off at once!” the inspector yelled.
    Enzo turned off the television and looked at him in astonishment.
    “What’s wrong, Inspector?”
    “I’m sorry,” said Montalbano. “It’s just that . . .”
    How quickly people had become cannibals!
    Ever since television had entered the home, everyone had grown accustomed to eating bread and corpses. From noon to one o’clock, and from seven to eight-thirty in the evening—that is, when people were at table—there wasn’t a single television station that wasn’t broadcasting images of bodies torn apart, mangled, burnt, or tortured, men, women, old folks, and little children, imaginatively and ingeniously slaughtered in one part of the world or another.
    Not a day went by without there being, in one part of the world or another, a war to broadcast to one and all. And so one saw people dying of hunger, who haven’t got a cent to buy a loaf of bread, shooting at other people likewise dying of hunger, with bazookas, Kalashnikovs, missiles, bombs, all ultramodern weapons costing far more than medicine and food for everyone would have cost.
    He imagined a dialogue between a husband sitting down to eat and his wife.
    What’d you make today, Catarina?
    For the first course, pasta with a sauce of children disemboweled by bombs.
    Good. And for the main course?
    Veal with a dressing of marketplace blown up by a suicide bomber.
    Gee, Cata, I’m already licking my fingers!

    Trying to preserve the taste of the langouste as long as possible between his tongue and palate, he set out on his customary stroll to the end of the jetty.
    At the halfway point there was, without fail, the usual fisherman with his line. They greeted one another, and the angler warned him:
    “Inspector, you oughta know that tomorrow is gonna be cold with heavy rain. An’ iss gonna stay that way for a whole week.”
    The man had never been wrong in his predictions.
    Montalbano’s dark mood, which the langouste had managed to bring up to a tolerable level, became worse than before.
    Was it possible the weather itself had gone crazy? How could it be that one week you were dying from heat at the equator and the following week you were freezing to death at the North Pole? O siccu o saccu? Was it all or nothing? Was there no longer a reasonable middle path?
    He sat down on his favorite rock, the flat one, fired up a cigarette. And he started thinking.
    Why had the killer gone and thrown the girl’s body into the dump?
    Certainly not to prevent it from being found or to hide it.
    The killer knew perfectly well that the corpse was sure to be discovered a few hours later. On the other hand, he had done everything he could to delay the girl’s identification as long as possible. Thus he had brought her to the dump merely to get rid of her.
    But if he’d been able to keep her in the place where he’d killed her for a whole day without anyone discovering the body, why hadn’t he left her there?
    Maybe it wasn’t a safe place.
    How wasn’t it safe?
    And if the murderer had been able to kill the girl and hold on to the body for a long time without anyone noticing, why would he do something so dangerous as to take it to the dump? There could only be one reason: necessity. He had to move the body. But why?
    The answer came to him from the langouste. Or, more precisely, from an aftertaste of langouste that resurfaced from the far reaches of his tongue. Enzo’s trattoria had been