The Terra-Cotta Dog Read Online Free

asks the friend. ‘No sirree,’ says the man, ‘he eats it freely, of his own choosing.’ So they make the bet, the man takes a nice spoonful of mustard, the kind that makes your stomach burn just to look at it, picks up the cat and wham! shoves it right up the animal’s ass. Poor cat, feeling his asshole burn like that, he starts licking it. And so, licking it up little by little, he eats all the mustard, of his own choosing. And that, my friend, says it all.”
    â€œI see what you mean. Now let’s go back to where we started.”
    â€œI was saying I want to be arrested, but I’m going to need some theatrics to save face.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œLet me explain.”
    He explained at great length, drinking a glass of wine from time to time. In the end Montalbano was satisfied with Tano’s reasons. But could he trust him? That was the question. In his youth, Montalbano had a great passion for card-playing, which he had luckily grown out of; for this reason he now sensed that Tano was playing him straight, with unmarked cards. He had no choice but to put his faith in this intuition and hope that he was not mistaken. And so they meticulously, painstakingly worked out the details of the arrest to ensure that nothing could go wrong. When they had finished talking, the sun was already high in the sky. Before leaving the house and letting the performance begin, the inspector gave Tano a long look, eye to eye.
    â€œTell me the truth.”
    â€œAt your command, Inspector.”
    â€œWhy did you choose me?”
    â€œBecause you, as you are showing me even now, are someone who understands things.”
    Â 
 
As he raced headlong down the little path between the vineyards, Montalbano remembered that Agatino Catarella would now be on duty at the station, and that therefore the phone conversation he was about to engage in promised at the very least to be problematic, if not the source of unfortunate and even dangerous misunderstandings. This Catarella was frankly hopeless. Slow to think and slow to act, he had been hired by the police because he was a distant relative of the formerly all-powerful Chamber Deputy Cusumano, who, after spending a summer cooling off in Ucciardone prison, had managed to reestablish solid enough connections with the new people in power to win himself a large slice of the cake, the very same cake that from time to time was miraculously renewed by merely sticking in a few new candied fruits or putting new candles in the place of the ones already melted.
    With Catarella, things would get most muddled whenever he got it in his head—which happened often—to speak in what he called Talian.
    One day he had shown up with a troubled look.
    â€œChief, could you by any chance be able to give me the name of one of those doctors called specialists?”
    â€œSpecialist in what, Cat?”
    â€œGonorrhea.”
    Montalbano had looked at him open-mouthed.
    â€œGonorrhea? You? When did you get that?”
    â€œAs I remember, I got it first when I was still a li’l thing, not yet six or seven years old.”
    â€œWhat the hell are you saying, Cat? Are you sure you mean gonorrhea?”
    â€œAbsolutely. Had it all my life, on and off. It’s here and gone, here and gone. Gonorrhea.”
    Â 
 
In the car, on his way to a telephone booth that was supposed to be near the Torresanta crossroads (supposed to be, that is, unless the receiver had been torn off, the entire telephone had been stolen, or the booth itself had disappeared), Montalbano decided not to call even his second-in-command, Mimì Augello, because he was the type—he couldn’t help it—who before anything else would inform the newsmen and then pretend to be surprised when they showed up at the scene. That left only Fazio and Tortorella, the two sergeants or whatever the hell they were called nowadays. He chose Fazio, since Tortorella had