Fishing, for the professor, proved to be exactly like eating. He never opened his mouth, except, every now and then, to curse the fish for not biting.
Around nine in the morning, with the sun already high in the sky, Montalbano couldn’t hold back any longer.
“I’m losing my father,” he said.
“My condolences,” the professor said without looking up from his fishing line.
The words seemed flat and inappropriate to the inspector.
“He hasn’t died yet. He’s dying,” he clarified.
“It makes no difference. For you, your father died the very moment you learned he was going to die. Everything else is, so to speak, a bodily formality. Nothing more. Does he live with you?” “No, he’s in another town.”
“By himself ?”
“Yes. And I can’t summon the courage to go see him in this state, before he goes. I just can’t. The very idea scares me.
I’ll never have the strength to set foot in the hospital where he’s staying.”
The old man said nothing, limiting himself to replacing the bait the fishes had eaten with many thanks. Then he decided to talk.
“You know, I happen to have followed an investigation of yours, the one about the ‘terra-cotta dog.’ In that instance, you abandoned an investigation into some weapons trafficking to throw yourself heart and soul into tracking a crime from fifty years ago, even though solving it wasn’t going to yield any practical results. Do you know why you did it?” “Out of curiosity?” Montalbano guessed.
“No, my friend. It was a very shrewd, intelligent way for you to keep practicing your unpleasant profession, but by escaping from everyday reality. Apparently this everyday reality sometimes becomes too much for you to bear. And so you escape. As I do when I take refuge here. But the moment I go back home, I immediately lose half of the benefit. The fact of your father’s dying is real, but you refuse to confirm it by seeing it in person. You’re like the child who thinks he can blot out the world by closing his eyes.” Professor Liborio Pintacuda, at this point, looked the inspector straight in the eye.
“When will you decide to grow up?”
2 7 5
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20
As he was going downstairs for supper, he decided he would head back to Vigàta the following morning. He’d been away for five days. Luicino had set the table in the usual little room, and Pintacuda was already sitting at his place and waiting for him.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Montalbano announced.
“Not me. I need another week of detox.”
Luicino brought the first course at once, and thereafter their mouths were used only for eating. When the second course arrived, they had a surprise.
“Meatballs!” the professor exclaimed, indignant. “Meatballs are for dogs!”
The inspector kept his cool. The aroma floating up from the dish and into his nose was rich and dense.
“What’s with Tanino? Is he sick?” Pintacuda inquired with a tone of concern.
“No sir, he’s in the kitchen,” replied Luicino.
Only then did the professor break a meatball in half with his fork and bring it to his mouth. Montalbano hadn’t yet made a move. Pintacuda chewed slowly, eyes half closed, and emitted a sort of moan.
“If one ate something like this at death’s door, he’d be happy even to go to Hell,” he said softly.
The inspector put half a meatball in his mouth, and with his tongue and palate began a scientific analysis that would have put Jacomuzzi to shame. So: fish and, no question, onion, hot pepper, whisked eggs, salt, pepper, breadcrumbs. But two other flavors, hiding under the taste of the butter used in the frying, hadn’t yet answered the call. At the second mouthful, he recognized what had escaped him in the first: cumin and coriander.
“Kofta s ! ” he shouted in amazement.
“What did you say?” asked Pintacuda.
“We’re eating an Indian dish, executed to perfection.”
“I don’t give a damn where it’s from,” said the professor.
“I only know it’s a dream. And please don’t speak to me again until I’ve finished eating.”
o o o
Pintacuda waited for the table to be cleared and then suggested they play their now customary game of chess that, equally customarily, Montalbano always lost.
“Excuse me a minute; first I’d like to say good-bye to Tanino.”
“I’ll come with you.”
The cook was in the process of giving his assistant a serious tongue-lashing for having poorly cleaned the pans.
“When you do that, they end up tasting like yesterday’s food and nobody can tell what they’re eating anymore.”
“Listen,” said Montalbano, “is it true you’ve never been outside of Sicily?”
He must have inadvertently assumed a coplike tone, because Tanino seemed suddenly to have returned to his days as a delinquent.
“Never, Inspector, I swear! I got witnesses!” Therefore he could never have learned that dish from some foreign restaurant.
“Have you ever had any dealings with Indians?”
“Like in the movies? Redskins?”
“Never mind,” said Montalbano. And he said good-bye to the miraculous cook, giving him a hug.
o o o
In the five days he’d been away—as Fazio reported to him—
nothing of any importance had happened. Carmelo Arnone, the man with the tobacco shop near the train station, had fired four shots at Angelo Cannizzaro, haberdasher, over a woman. Mimì Augello, who happened to be in the area, had courageously confronted the gunman and disarmed him.
“So,” Montalbano commented, “Cannizzaro came away with little more than a good scare.”
It was well known to everyone in town that Carmelo Arnone didn’t know how to handle a gun and couldn’t even hit a cow at point-blank range.
“Well, no.”
“He hit him?” asked Montalbano, stunned.
Actually, Fazio went on to explain, he hadn’t hit his target this time either. One of the bullets, though, after striking a lamppost, had ricocheted back and ended up between Cannizzaro’s shoulder blades. The wound was nothing, the bullet had lost all its force by then. But in no time the rumor had spread all over town that the cowardly Carmelo Arnone had shot Angelo Cannizzaro in the back. So Cannizzaro’s brother, Pasqualino, who dealt in fava beans and wore glasses with lenses an inch thick, armed himself, tracked down Carmelo Arnone, and shot at him, missing twice. That is, he missed both the target and the identity of the target. Deceived by a strong family resemblance, he had mistaken Carmelo’s brother Filippo, who owned a fruit-and-vegetable store, for Carmelo himself. As for missing the target, the first shot had ended up God-knows-where, while the second had injured the pinky on the left hand of a shopkeeper from Canicattì who’d come to Vigàta on business. At this point the pistol had jammed, otherwise Pasqualino Cannizzaro, firing blindly, would surely have wrought another slaughter of the innocents.
Ah and, also, there were two robberies, four purse snatch-ings, and three cars torched. Routine stuff.
There was a knock at the door, and Tortorella came in after pushing the door open with his foot, arms laden with a good six or seven pounds of papers.
“Shall we make good use of your time while you’re here?”
“Tortorè, you make it sound like I’ve been away for a hundred years!”
Since he never signed anything without first carefully reading what it was about, Montalbano had barely dispatched a couple of pounds of documents when it was already lunchtime. Though he felt some stirring in the pit of his stomach, he decided not to go to the Trattoria San Calogero.
He wasn’t ready yet to desecrate the memory of Tanino, the cook directly inspired by the Madonna. The betrayal, when it came, would have to be justified, at least in part, by absti-nence.
He finished signing papers at eight that evening, with aches not only in his fingers, but in his whole arm.
; o o o
By the time he got home, he was ravenous; in the pit of his stomach there now was a hole. How should he proceed?
Should he open the oven and fridge and see what Adelina had made for him? He reasoned that, if going from one restaurant to another could technically be called a betrayal, to go from Tanino to Adelina certainly could not. Rather, it might be better defined as a return to the family fold after an adulterous interlude. The oven was empty. In the fridge he found ten or so olives, three sardines, and a bit of Lampedu-san tuna in a small glass jar. On the kitchen table there was some bread wrapped in paper, next to a note from the housekeeper.
Since you didna tell me when you was commin back, I cook and cook and then I gotta thro alla this good food away.
I’m not gonna cook no more.
She didn’t want to go on wasting things, clearly, but more importantly, she must have felt offended because he hadn’t told her where he was going (“All right, so Ima just a maid, sir, but sommatime you treeta me jes like a maid!”).
He listlessly ate a couple of olives with bread, which he decided to accompany with some of his father’s wine. He turned the television on to the Free Channel. It was time for the news.
Nicolò Zito was finishing up a commentary on the arrest of a town councilman in Fela for embezzlement and graft. Then he moved on to the latest stories. On the outskirts of Sommatina, between Caltanissetta and Enna, a woman’s body had been recovered in an advanced state of decomposition.
Montalbano bolted upright in his armchair.
The woman had been strangled, stuffed into a bag, and thrown into a rather deep, dry well. Beside her they found a small suitcase that led to the victim’s identification. Karima Moussa, aged thirty-four, a native of Tunis who had moved to Vigàta a few years earlier.
The photo of Karima and François that the inspector had given Nicolò appeared on the screen.
Did the viewing audience remember the Free Channel’s report on the woman’s disappearance? No trace, meanwhile, had turned up of the little boy, her son. According to Inspector Diliberto, who was conducting the investigation, the killer might have been the Tunisian woman’s unknown pro-curer. There nevertheless remained, in the inspector’s opinion, numerous details to be cleared up.
Montalbano whinnied, turned off the TV, and smiled.
Lohengrin Pera had kept his word. He stood up, stretched, sat back down, and immediately fell asleep in the armchair. An animal slumber, probably dreamless, like a sack of potatoes.
o o o
The next morning, from his office, he called the commissioner and invited himself to dinner. Then he called police headquarters in Sommatino.
“Diliberto? Montalbano here. I’m calling from Vigàta.”
“Hello, colleague. What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to know about that woman you found in the well.”
“Karima Moussa.”
“Yes. Are you absolutely certain about the identification?”
“Without a shadow of a doubt. In her bag, among other things, we found an ATM card from the Banca Agricola di Montelusa.”
“Excuse me for interrupting, but anyone, you see, could have put—”
“Let me finish. Three years ago, this woman had an accident for which she was given twelve stitches in her right arm at Montelusa Hospital. It checks out. The scar was still visible despite the body’s advanced state of decomposition.” “Listen, Diliberto, I just got back to Vigàta this morning after a few days off. I’m short on news and found out about the body on a local TV station. They reported you still had some questions.” “Not about the identification. But I’m certain the woman was killed and buried somewhere else, not where we found her after receiving an anonymous tip. So my question is: Why did they dig her up and move the body? What need was there to do that?” “What makes you so sure they did?”
“You see, Karima’s suitcase was soiled with bodily waste from its first period alongside the corpse. And in order to carry the suitcase to the well where it was found, they wrapped it in newspaper.” “So?”
“The newspaper was only three days old. Whereas the woman had been killed at least ten days earlier. The coroner would bet his life on it. So I need to figure out why she was moved. And I have no idea; I just can’t understand it.” Montalbano had an idea, but he couldn’t tell his colleague what it was. If only those fuckheads in the secret services could do something right for once! Like the time when, wanting to make people believe that a certain Libyan airplane had crashed in Sila on a specific day, they staged a show of explosions and flames, and then, in the autopsy, it was determined that the pilot had actually died fifteen days earlier from the impact. The flying cadaver.
o o o
After a simple but elegant dinner, Montalbano and his superior retired to the study. The commissioner’s wife withdrew in turn to watch television.
Montalbano’s story was long and so detailed that he didn’t even leave out his voluntary crushing of Lohengrin Pera’s little gold eyeglasses. At a certain point, the report turned into a confession. But the commissioner’s absolution was slow in coming. He was truly annoyed at having been left out of the game.
“I’m mad at you, Montalbano. You denied me a chance to amuse myself a little before calling it quits.”
o o o
My dear Livia,
This letter will surprise you for at least two reasons. The first is the letter itself, my having written it and sent it. Un-written letters I’ve sent you by the bushel, at least one a day. I realized that in all these years, I’ve only sent you an occa-sional miserly postcard with a few “bureaucratic, inspectorly” greetings, as you called them.
The second reason, which will delight you as much as surprise you, is its content.
Since you left exactly fifty-five days ago (as you can see, I keep track), many things have happened, some of which concern us directly. To say they “happened,” however, is incorrect; it would be more accurate to write that I made them happen.
You reproached me once for a certain tendency I have to play God by altering the course of events (for others) through omissions great and small, and even through more or less damnable falsifications. Maybe it’s true. Actually, it most certainly is. But don’t you think this, too, is part of my job?
Whatever the case, you should know at once that I’m about to tell you of another supposed transgression of mine, one that was aimed, however, at turning a chain of events in our favor, and was therefore not for or against anyone else. But first I want to tell you about François.
Neither you nor I have even mentioned his name since the last night you spent in Marinella, when you reproached me for not having realized that the boy could become the son we would never have. What’s more, you were hurt by the way I had the child taken from you. But, you see, I was terrified, and with good reason. He had become a dangerous witness, and I was afraid they would make him disappear (or “neutralize” him, as they say euphemistically).
The omission of that name has weighed heavily on our phone conversations, making them evasive and a little loveless.
Today I want to make it clear to you that if I never once mentioned François before now, it was to keep you from nurturing dangerous illusions. And if I’m writing to you about him now, it is because this fear has subsided.
Do you remember that morning in Marinella when François ran away to look for his mother? Well, as I was walking him home, he told me he didn’t want to end up in an orphanage. And I replied that this would never happen. I gave him my word of honor, and we shook on it. I made a promise, and I will keep it at all costs.
In these fifty-five days Mimì Augello, on my request, has been calling his sister three times a week to see how the boy is doing. The answers have always been reassuring.
The day before yesterday, in Mimì’s company, I went to see him (by the way, you ought to write Mimì a letter thanking him for his generosity and friendship). I had a chance to observe François for a few minutes whi
le he was playing with Mimì’s nephew, who’s the same age. He was cheerful and carefree. As soon as he saw me (he recognized me at once), his expression changed. He sort of turned sad. Children’s memories, like those of the elderly, are intermittent. I’m sure the thought of his mother had come back to him. He gave me a big hug and then, looking at me with bright, tearless eyes—he doesn’t seem to me a boy who cries easily—he didn’t ask me what I was afraid he’d ask, that is, if I had any news of Karima. In a soft voice, he said only: “Take me to Livia.”
Not to his mother. To you. He must be convinced he’ll never see his mother again. And unfortunately, he’s right.
You know that from the very first, based on unhappy experience, I was convinced that Karima had been murdered. To do what I had in mind, I had to make a dangerous move that would bring the accomplices to her murder out in the open.
The next step was to force them to produce the woman’s body in such a way that, when it was found, it would be certain to be identified. It all went well. And so I was able to act “officially” on behalf of François, who has now been declared motherless. The commissioner was a tremendous help to me, putting all his many acquaintances to work. If Karima’s body had not been found, my steps would have surely been hindered by endless bureaucratic red tape, which would have delayed the resolution of our problem for years and years.
I realize this letter is getting too long, so I’ll change register.
1) In the eyes of the law, Italian as well as Tunisian, François is in a paradoxical situation. In fact, he’s an orphan who doesn’t exist, inasmuch as his birth was never registered either in Sicily or Tunisia.
2) The judge in Montelusa who deals with these questions has sort of straightened out his status, but only for as long as it takes to go through the necessary procedures. He has assigned him temporarily to the care of Mimì’s sister.
3) The same judge has informed me that while it is theo-retically possible in Italy for an unmarried woman to adopt a child, in reality it’s all talk. And he cited the case of an actress who was subjected to years of judicial pronouncements, opin-ions, and decisions, each one contradicting the last.
The Snack Thief Page 21
