IM5 Excursion to Tindari (2005)

by Andrea Camilleri

  “You yourself said they no longer loved each other!”

  “And does the young man’s behavior seem normal to you? Since when have you Sicilians become more Swedish than the Swedish?”

  “See, Ingrid, Vanya’s probably right when she says Ingrò and Sanfilippo knew each other ...The kid was an excellent computer technician, and there must be plenty of computers at the Montelusa clinic. When Nenè first hooked up with Vanya, he didn’t know she was the doctor’s wife. When he finds out—maybe because she told him—they’re already taken with each other. It’s all so clear.”

  “Bah!” said Ingrid, skeptical.

  “Look: the kid says he’s made a mistake. And he’s right, because he’s definitely lost his job. And the doctor sends his wife away because he’s afraid of the consequences, the gossip ... Say the two got some bright idea, like running away together ... Better not to let them have the opportunity.”

  From the look Ingrid gave him, Montalbano realized that she was not convinced by his explanations. But since that was the way she was, she didn’t ask any more questions.

  After Ingrid left, he remained seated on the veranda. The trawlers were heading out of the port to fish through the night. He didn’t want to think about anything. Then he heard a harmonious sound, very close by. Somebody was whistling softly. Who? He looked around. There was nobody. It was him! He was the one whistling! As soon as he realized this, he couldn’t whistle anymore. Therefore there were moments when, like a double, he could actually whistle. He started laughing.

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he mumbled.

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

  The third time he was no longer laughing. In fact he had turned dead serious. His forehead was sweating a little.

  He filled his glass with straight whisky.

  “Chief! Chief!” said Catarella, running after him. “I gots this letter here I’s a sposta give to you poissonally since yesterday. ‘Sfrom that lawyer Guttadadaro, who said I’m only sposta give it to you poissonally in poisson!”

  He dug it out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to Montalbano. The inspector opened it.

  Esteemed Inspector, the person you know, my client and friend, had intended to write you a letter expressing his increased admiration in your regard. He changed his mind, however, and asked instead that I inform you he will be calling you by phone. Most respectfully yours, Guttadauro.

  He tore it up into little pieces and went into Augello’s office. Mimi was at his desk.

  “I’m writing the report,” he said.

  “Fuck it,” said Montalbano.

  “What’s going on?” Augello asked, alarmed. “I don’t like the look on your face.”

  “Did you bring me the novel?”

  “Sanfilippo’s? Yes.”

  He pointed at a large envelope on the desk. The inspector picked it up and put it under his arm.

  “What’s wrong?” Augello insisted.

  The inspector didn’t answer.

  “I’m going home to Marinella. Don’t let anyone call me there. I’ll be back at the station around midnight. I want you all here.”

  17

  Once outside the police station, his great desire to hole up at Marinella and start reading suddenly disappeared the way the wind sometimes does, uprooting trees one moment and vanishing the next, as if it had never existed. He got in his car and drove towards the port. When he arrived in the neighborhood, he stopped the car and got out, bringing along the envelope. The truth of the matter was that he couldn’t muster up the courage to read it: he was afraid of finding in Nenè Sanfilippo’s words a stinging confirmation of an idea that had occurred to him after Ingrid left. He walked slowly, deliberately, to the lighthouse and sat down on the flat rock. He smelled the strong, acrid odor of the lippo, the greeny down that grows on the lower half of the rocks, the part in contact with the sea. He glanced at his watch: there was still an hour of light remaining. He could, if he wanted, start reading right there. But he still didn’t feel like it; he wasn’t up to it. What if Sanfilippo’s writing turned out in the end to be a pile of shit, the constipated fantasy of a dilettante who thinks he can write a novel just because he learned how to parse sentences in school? Which isn’t even taught anymore, besides. Another sign—as if he needed any more—of just how far he was getting on in years. But to keep holding those pages in his hand, unable to decide one way or another, made his skin crawl. Maybe it was better to go back to Marinella and start reading on the veranda. He would be breathing the same sea air.

  At a glance he realized that Nenè Sanfilippo, to hide what he really had to say, had resorted to the same method he used in filming the naked Vanya. In that instance the tape had begun with some twenty minutes of The Getaway; here the first pages were copied from a famous novel: Asimov’s I, Robot.

  It took Montalbano two hours to read the whole thing. The closer he got to the end, the clearer what Nenè Sanfilippo was saying became to him, and the more often his hand reached out for the whisky bottle.

  The novel had no ending. It broke off in the middle of a sentence. But what he’d read was more than enough for him. From the pit of his stomach a violent spasm of nausea rose up and seized his throat. He ran to the bathroom, barely able to stand, knelt down in front of the toilet and started to vomit. He vomited the whisky he’d just drunk, vomited what he’d eaten that day as well as what he’d eaten the day before, and the day before that, and he felt, with his sweaty head now entirely inside the toilet bowl and a sharp pain in his side, as if he were endlessly vomiting up the entire time of his life on earth, going all the way back to the pap he was given as a baby, and when, at last, he’d expelled even his own mother’s milk, he kept on vomiting poison bitterness, bile, pure hatred.

  He managed to stand up, holding on to the sink, but his legs could barely support him. He was sure he was getting a fever. He stuck his head under the open faucet.

  “Too old for this profession,” he muttered.

  He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.

  He didn’t stay there long. When he got up his head was spinning, but the blind rage that had overwhelmed him was now turning into lucid determination. He called the office.

  “Hallo? Hallo? This the Vigata Pol—”

  “Montalbano here, Cat. Put Inspector Augello on, if he’s there.”

  He was there.

  “What is it, Salvo?”

  “Listen to me carefully, Mimi. I want you and Fazio, right now, to take a car, not a squad car, mind you, and drive towards Santoli. I want to know if Dr. Ingrò’s villa is being watched.”

  “By whom?”

  “No questions, Mimi. If it’s being watched, it’s certainly not by us. And you must try to determine if the doctor is alone or with others. Take as long as you need to be sure of what you’re seeing. I summoned all the men for a midnight meeting. Cancel the order; it’s no longer necessary. When you’ve finished in Santoli, let Fazio go home and come to Marinella to tell me how things stand.”

  He hung up and the telephone rang. It was Livia.

  “How come you’re already home at this hour?” she asked.

  She was pleased, but more than pleased, she was happily surprised.

  “And if you know I’m never home at this hour, why did you call?”

  He’d answered a question with a question. But he needed to stall. Otherwise Livia, knowing him as she did, would realize that something wasn’t right with him.

  “You know, Salvo, for the last hour or so something strange has been happening to me. It’s never happened to me before, or at least, it’s never been so strong as now. It’s hard to explain.”

  Now it was Livia who was stalling.

  “Give it a try.”

  “Well, it’s as though you were here.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Okay. See, when I came home, I didn’t see my dining room, I saw yours. Not exactly, though; it was my room, of course, but
at the same time, it was yours.”

  “As in dreams.”

  “Yes, something like that. And since that moment, it’s as though I’ve been split in two. I’m in Boccadasse, but at the same time I’m with you, in Marinella. It’s ... really beautiful. I called because I knew you’d be home.”

  To hide his emotions, Montalbano tried to make a joke of it.

  “The fact is, you’re curious.”

  “About what?”

  “About the layout of my house.”

  “But I already ...” Livia reacted.

  She broke off, suddenly remembering the little game he’d suggested they play: getting engaged, starting all over.

  “I’d like to get to know it.”

  “Why don’t you come?”

  He’d been unable to control his tone, and a sincere question had come out. Livia took notice.

  “What’s wrong, Salvo?”

  “Nothing. A bad mood, it’ll pass. An ugly case.”

  “Do you really want me to come?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll catch the afternoon flight tomorrow. I love you.”

  He had to find a way to pass the time while waiting for Mimi. He didn’t feel like eating, even though he had emptied his guts of everything possible. His hand, as if of its own will, took a book off the shelf. He glanced at the title: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad. He recalled having liked it, even a lot, but couldn’t remember anything else. It often happened that if he read the opening lines of a novel, or the conclusion, a little compartment in his memory would open up, and characters, situations, phrases would come tumbling out. “Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law.” That’s how the book began, but these words didn’t tell him anything. “He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.” These were the final words, and they said too much. Then a sentence from the book came back to him: “No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity ...” He hastily put the book back in its place. No, his hand had not acted by itself, independently of his mind; it had been guided, unconsciously of course, by him, by what was inside him. He sat down in the armchair and turned on the television. The first image he saw was of prisoners in a concentration camp, not one of Hitler‘s, but a contemporary one. It wasn’t clear where, because the faces of people subject to horror are the same everywhere. He turned it off. He went out on the veranda, sat there staring at the sea, trying to breathe with the same rhythm as the surf.

  Was it the door or the phone? He looked at his watch: past eleven, too early for Mimi.

  “Hello? Sinagra here.”

  Balduccio Sinagra’s faint voice, which always sounded ready to break like a spider’s web in a gust of wind, was unmistakable.

  “If you have anything to say to me, Sinagra, call me at the station.”

  “Wait. What’s wrong, you scared? This phone’s not bugged. Unless yours is.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I wanted to tell you that I feel bad, really bad.”

  “Because you haven’t heard from your beloved grandson Japichinu?”

  It was a shot fired straight at the balls. And for a moment, Balduccio Sinagra remained silent, long enough to absorb the blow and catch his breath.

  “I’m convinced that my grandson, wherever he is, is better off than I am. ‘Cause my kidneys don’t work no more. I need a transplant, or I’ll die.”

  Montalbano said nothing. He let the falcon fly in ever smaller, concentric circles.

  “But do you know,” resumed the old man, “how many patients like me need this operation? Over ten thousand, Inspector. While waiting for your turn, you have all the time in the world to die.”

  The falcon had stopped circling and was now ready to swoop down on the target.

  “And then you have to be sure that the surgeon operating on you is good, dependable ...”

  “Someone like Dr. Ingrò?”

  The inspector had reached the target first; the falcon had dawdled too long. He’d managed to defuse the bomb Sinagra had in his hand. And he would not be able to say, yet again, that he had manipulated Inspector Montalbano like a marionette at the puppet theater. The old man’s reaction was authentic.

  “My compliments, Inspector,” he said, “my sincerest compliments.”

  And he continued:

  “Dr. Ingrò is the right man. But I’m told he had to close down his hospital here in Montelusa. Seems he’s hot in the best of health himself, poor man.”

  “What do the doctors say? Is it serious?”

  “They don’t know yet.They want to be sure before they decide on a treatment. Bah, we’re all in the hands of the Lord, dear Inspector!”

  He hung up.

  At last the doorbell rang. He was making a pot of coffee.

  “There’s nobody watching the villa,” Mimi said as he came in. “And until a little over half an hour ago, when I left to come here, he was alone.”

  “Somebody may have gone there in the meantime.”

  “If so, Fazio will call me from his cell phone. But you’re going to tell me right now why you’re suddenly so fixated on Dr. Ingrò.”

  “Because they’re still keeping him in limbo.They haven’t decided whether to let him continue working or kill him like they did the Griffos and Nenè Sanfilippo.”

  “So the doctor’s mixed up in this too?” asked Mimi in astonishment.

  “He’s mixed up in it, all right,” said Montalbano.

  “Says who?”

  A tree, a Saracen olive tree. This would have been the correct answer. But Mimi would have thought him insane.

  “Ingrid phoned Vanya, who’s scared out of her wits because there are certain things she doesn’t understand. For instance, the fact that Nenè knew the doctor really well but never said anything to her. Or the fact that her husband, when he caught her in bed with her lover, didn’t get angry or upset. He only got worried. And just this evening, Balduccio Sinagra confirmed it all for me.”

  “Jesus Christ!” said Mimì. “What’s Sinagra got to do with this? And why would he turn informer?”

  “He didn’t turn informer. He told me he needed a kidney transplant, and said he agreed when I mentioned Dr. Ingrò’s name. But he also said the good doctor wasn’t in the best of health. You told me the same thing, remember? Except that the word ‘health’ has different meanings for you and Balduccio.”

  The coffee was ready. They drank it.

  “You see,” the inspector resumed, “Nenè Sanfilippo wrote the whole story, and quite clearly at that.”

  “Where?”

  “In the novel. He starts out by copying the pages of a famous book, then tells his own story, then adds another passage from the famous novel, and so on. It’s a story about robots.”

  “It’s science fiction, which is why I thought—”

  “You fell into the trap set up by Sanfilippo. His robots, which he calls, say, Alpha 715 or Omega 37, are made of metal and circuits, but they think and feel just like us. Sanfilippo’s robot world is a carbon copy of our own.”

  “What does the novel say?”

  “It’s the story of a young robot, Delta 32, who falls in love with a female robot, Gamma 1024, who is married to a world-famous robot, Beta 5, who knows how to replace broken robot parts with new ones. The surgeon robot—that’s what we’ll call him—is a man, sorry, a robot, who’s in constant need of money, because he has a mania for expensive paintings. One day he incurs a debt he’s unable to pay. And so a criminal robot, a gang leader, makes him an offer. That is, they’ll give him all the money he wants, on the condition that he perform clandestine transplants on clients of their choosing, first-rate clients from all over the world, rich and powerful people who don’t have the time or the desire to wait their turn. The doctor robot then asks how it will be possible to get the right spare parts in good time. They tell him this isn’t a problem: they k
now how to find the spare parts. How? By scrapping a robot that meets the requirements and removing the part they need. The scrapped robot is then dumped into the sea or buried underground. We can serve any client, says the leader, whose name is Omicron 1. All over the world, he explains, there are people imprisoned, in jails and special camps. And we have a robot in every one of these camps. And near every one of these camps, there is a landing strip. Those of us you see here, Omicron 1 continues, are just a tiny part of the whole. Our organization is at work all over the world; it’s become globalized. And so Beta 5 accepts. Beta 5’s requests will be relayed to Omicron 1, who will in turn convey them to Delta 32, who, using a highly advanced Internet system, will communicate them to the ... let’s call them operative services. And that’s where the novel ends. Nenè didn’t have a chance to write the conclusion. Omicron 1 wrote it for him.”

  Augello sat there a long time, thinking. Apparently the full significance of what Montalbano had just told him hadn’t dawned on him yet.Then he understood, turned pale, and said in a low voice:

  “Baby robots, too, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” the inspector confirmed.

  “And how does the story continue, in your opinion?”

  “You must start from the premise that the people who organized the whole affair bear a terrible responsibility.”

  “I’ll say. The death of—”

  “Not just death, Mimì. Life, too.”

  “Life?”

  “Of course.The lives of those who’ve been operated on. They’ve paid a horrific price, and I’m not talking about money. I mean the death of another person. If this ever came out, they’d be finished, whatever their position, whether at the top of a government, economic empire, or banking conglomerate. They’d lose face forever. Therefore, the way I see it, things went as follows: One day, somebody finds out about the love affair between Sanfilippo and the doctor’s wife. As of that moment, Vanya becomes a danger to the entire organization. She represents the potential link between the surgeon and the criminal organization. The two things must remain absolutely separate. What to do? Kill Vanya? No, that would put the doctor right in the middle of a murder investigation, which would be plastered all over the newspapers ... The best thing is to close down the Vigata headquarters. But first they inform the doctor of his wife’s infidelity. He should be able to tell, from Vanya’s reaction, whether she’s wise to anything. Vanya, however, knows nothing. She’s sent back to her native country. The organization then cuts off all the roads that might lead to her: the Griffos, the Sanfilippos ...”