The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri

the Jeep on loan from Vinti’s, which was loaded up with shovels, mattocks, pickaxes, and spades. They looked like laborers on their way to earn a day’s pay working the land.
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The Crasto mountain, which for its part would never have dreamed of calling itself a mountain, was a rather bald little hill that rose up west of Vigàta barely five hundred yards from the sea. It had been carefully pierced by a tunnel, now boarded up, that was supposed to have been an integral part of a road that started nowhere and led nowhere, a very useful bypass route for diverting funds into bottomless pockets. It was, in fact, called “the bypass.” Legend had it that deep in the mountain’s bowels was a crasto, a ram, made of solid gold. The tunnel-diggers never found it, but those who won the bid for the government contract certainly did. Attached to the mountain, on the landward side, was a kind of stronghold of rock called the Crasticeddru, the “little Crasto.” The earthmovers and trucks had never reached this area, and it preserved an untamed beauty.
    Having come down some impassable roads to avoid attracting attention, the two cars headed straight for the Crasticeddru. In the absence of any further path or trail, it was very hard to go on, but the inspector insisted that the cars pull right up to the foot of the rocky spur.
    Montalbano ordered everyone out of the cars. The air was cool, the morning bright.
    â€œWhat do you want us to do?” asked Fazio.
    â€œSearch the Crasticeddru, all of you, very carefully. Look everywhere, and look hard. There’s supposed to be an entrance to a cave somewhere. It’s been covered up, camouflaged by rocks or vegetation. Keep your eyes peeled. We have to find it. I assure you it’s there.”
    They fanned out.
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Two hours later, discouraged, they met back up beside the cars. The sun was beating down, they were sweating, but farsighted Fazio had brought along thermoses of coffee and tea.
    â€œLet’s try again,” said Montalbano. “But don’t look only around the rock; search also along the ground, you might see something that looks fishy.”
    They resumed their hunt, and half an hour later Montalbano heard Galluzzo call from afar.
    â€œInspector! Inspector! Come here!”
    The inspector went over to the policeman, who had assigned himself the side of the spur closest to the highway that went to Fela.
    â€œLook.”
    Someone had tried to make them disappear, but at a certain point along the ground, there were clearly visible tracks left behind by a large truck.
    â€œThey lead over there,” said Galluzzo, pointing to the rock face. As he was saying this, he suddenly stopped, mouth agape.
    â€œJesus God!” said Montalbano.
    How had they managed not to see it before? There was a huge boulder placed in an odd position, with shoots of withered grass sticking out from behind. As Galluzzo was calling to his mates, the inspector ran towards the boulder, grabbed a tuft of sword grass and tugged hard. He almost fell backward: the clump had no roots. It had merely been stuck there with bunches of sorghum to camouflage the entrance to the cave.

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    The boulder was a great stone slab, roughly rectangular in shape, that appeared to be of a piece with the rock around it and rested on a sort of giant step, also rock. At a glance Montalbano determined that it was roughly six feet tall and about four and a half feet wide: moving it by hand was out of the question. And yet there had to be a way. Halfway up its right side, about four inches from the edge, was a perfectly natural-looking hole.
    â€œIf this was an actual wooden door,” the inspector reasoned, “that opening would be at the right height for inserting a doorknob.”
    He took a pen out of his pocket and stuck it in the hole. The pen fit all the way inside, but when Montalbano was about to put it back in his pocket, he noticed that the pen had