Windows To The World

  In this story Montalbano is determined to resign from the police force. There have been some police actions in Genoa in 2001, which were highlighted by brutal police tactics and resulted in many high-ranking police being brought to trial. What angered Montalbano was that much of the evidence used by the police in their defence was fabricated indicating falsely that the children that they injured were dangerous. Montalbano took this personally; it shamed him and reflected poorly on the integrity he had brought to his job all the years he had been in the police force.

I understand his position well. There is a physician pedophile in the news that has destroyed the respect many people have had for their doctors. I am a physician and I am in the position that Montalbano was in. The integrity most physicians bring to the job is damaged. The legislators in my state now even consider me a latent felon and I am required to get a background check and fingerprints on a regular basis. I can be fined for a very long list of infractions of not turning in my fellow physicians on any mere suspicion of misdoings even not washing hands between patients. These are the draconian Bradley laws and they are not done yet.  

But the worst is the shame I feel that such a man was in the practice of medicine and that he escaped unnoticed for so long. Patients have been betrayed, but so have doctors.

ROUNDING THE MARK

Andrea Camilleri

So Salvo goes for a long swim, as is his wont when he needs to get away and think. He bumps into someone when he is floating then realizes that this person has been floating for a long time and is actually coming apart at the seams. Montalbano puts his bathing suit around the body's arm and slowly drags him to shore. There is not much left of the stranger but Montalbano’s team of detectives and their contacts begin to figure out the ways and means a man can end up in the ocean like this body did.

At about the same time Montalbano is called to the docks on a simple errand and he catches a little runaway boy and returns him to his mother, but he doesn’t seem happy to go and this gnaws at Salvo as well. There was a lot of pandemonium because this was a boatload of immigrants showing up in Sicily.

Montalbano realized later that  he had turned the little boy over to the wrong people, human traffickers. How could he know? Well, the signs were there, the boy was running away, he was not happy to return, and he couldn’t speak the language. Small children are brought in for uses as beggars, sex objects, organ donors and are put down as being with their parents, but are orphans, or stolen or sold. A case of things are not what they seem. Now it is time for Montalbano to act, but it is too late. Too late for him, but there are always others.

Camilleri’s mysteries always echo life and despite the seriousness of the subject matter he does it in an uplifting manner. It is miraculous in a way. There will sadly always be other little boys and other Bradleys and Montalbano as well as we are left in the middle. Legislators who bluster and want to be heard will be there too. Not that something doesn’t have to be done; it is either too little too late or over the top.