The Potter's Field by Andrea Camilleri

the nightstand, got out of bed, went into the living room, and sat down in the armchair in front of the television. Turning it on, he was greeted by none other than the chicken-ass face of Pippo Ragonese.
    â€œ. . . owning up to our mistakes, on those fortunately rare occasions when we do make mistakes, is the indisputable mark of fairness and good faith on our part. Indeed fairness and good faith are the shining beacons that have always lighted the way during our thirty years of delivering the news. Well, we did recently make one such mistake. We accused Chief Inspector Salvo Montalbano of the Vigàta Police of not pursuing a possible lead in the case of the unknown and dismembered murder victim found in an arid stretch of land called ’u critaru . This lead turned out to have no connection to that horrific crime. We therefore extend our public apologies to Inspector Montalbano. This does not mean, however, that our reservations about him and the methods he often applies are thereby diminished. But now I would like to talk about the town council of Montereale, which recently . . .”
    Montalbano turned it off. So the commissioner had kept his word.
    He stood up, feeling restless. He started fidgeting about the house.
    There was something in Camilleri’s novel that kept buzzing in his brain.
    What was it? Was it possible his memory, too, was beginning to fail?
    Was this already the start of arteriosclerosis?
    He tried hard to remember.
    It was definitely something to do with the death of Judas but wasn’t actually written in the book.
    It was a sort of parallel thought that appeared and vanished like a flash. But if it was a parallel thought, there was no point in rereading the novel from the start. It was unlikely the flash would repeat itself.
    Still, there might be a way.
    Somewhere in his library he must have the four Gospels in a single volume. Where were they hidden? Why was everything always disappearing in this house? First the thermometer, now the Gospels . . . At last he found them, after half an hour of a panoply of curses unsuitable to the book he wanted to read.
    He sat back down in the armchair and looked up, in the first Gospel, that of Matthew, the passage that recounted the suicide of Judas.
    Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,
    Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? See thou to that.
    And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
    And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.
    And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. 1
    The other Gospels didn’t talk about the death of Judas.
    Though he didn’t quite know why, he felt excited. A sort of tremor ran through his whole body. He was like a dog pointing towards its prey. He sensed that there was something of great importance in those lines of Matthew.
    With saintly patience he read the verses again, slowly, almost syllable by syllable.
    When he reached the words, the potter’s field , he felt an actual shock.
    The potter’s field.
    All at once, he found himself again on a footpath, his clothes drenched with rain, looking out over a gorge made up of slabs of clay. And he heard the peasant’s words again:
    â€œ. . . this place’s always been called ’u critaru . . . I sell the clay to people who make vases, jugs, pots, that kind of thing . . .”
    The potter’s field. Sicilian translation: ’u critaru.
    That was the parallel thought he’d had.
    But did it mean anything? Might it not be a simple coincidence ? Wasn’t he perhaps getting carried away by his imagination? Fine, but what was wrong with having a little