The Safety Net Read online

  Praise for Andrea Camilleri and the Montalbano Series

  “Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries might sell like hotcakes in Europe, but these world-weary crime stories were unknown here until the oversight was corrected (in Stephen Sartarelli’s salty translation) by the welcome publication of The Shape of Water . . . This savagely funny police procedural . . . prove[s] that sardonic laughter is a sound that translates ever so smoothly into English.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Hailing from the land of Umberto Eco and La Cosa Nostra, Montalbano can discuss a pointy-headed book like Western Attitudes Toward Death as unflinchingly as he can pore over crime-scene snuff photos. He throws together an extemporaneous lunch of shrimp with lemon wedges and oil as gracefully as he dodges advances from attractive women.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “You either love Andrea Camilleri or you haven’t read him yet. Each novel in this wholly addictive, entirely magical series, set in Sicily and starring a detective unlike any other in crime fiction, blasts the brain like a shot of pure oxygen. Aglow with local color, packed with flint-dry wit, as fresh and clean as Mediterranean seafood—altogether transporting. Long live Camilleri, and long live Montalbano.”

  A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

  “[Camilleri’s mysteries] offer quirky characters, crisp dialogue, bright storytelling—and Salvo Montalbano, one of the most engaging protagonists in detective fiction.”

  —USA Today

  “Like Mike Hammer or Sam Spade, Montalbano is the kind of guy who can’t stay out of trouble . . . Still, deftly and lovingly translated by Stephen Sartarelli, Camilleri makes it abundantly clear that under the gruff, sardonic exterior our inspector has a heart of gold, and that any outburst, fumbles, or threats are made only in the name of pursuing truth.”

  —The Nation

  “Camilleri can do a character’s whole backstory in half a paragraph.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Subtle, sardonic, and molto simpatico: Montalbano is the Latin re-creation of Philip Marlowe, working in a place that manages to be both more and less civilized than Chandler’s Los Angeles.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “Sublime and darkly humorous . . . Camilleri balances his hero’s personal and professional challenges perfectly and leaves the reader eager for more.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The books are full of sharp, precise characterizations and with subplots that make Montalbano endearingly human . . . Like the antipasti that Montalbano contentedly consumes, the stories are light and easily consumed, leaving one eager for the next course.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit our website at www.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  A PENGUIN MYSTERY

  THE SAFETY NET

  Andrea Camilleri, a bestseller in Italy and Germany, is the author of the popular Inspector Montalbano mystery series as well as historical novels that take place in nineteenth-century Sicily. His books have been made into Italian TV shows and translated into thirty-two languages. His thirteenth Montalbano novel, The Potter’s Field, won the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger Award and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He died in 2019.

  Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator and the author of three books of poetry.

  Also by Andrea Camilleri

  Hunting Season

  The Brewer of Brewston

  Montalbano’s First Case and Other Stories

  Death at Sea

  THE INSPECTOR MONTALBANO SERIES

  The Shape of Water

  The Terra-Cotta Dog

  The Snack Thief

  Voice of the Violin

  Excursion to Tindari

  The Smell of the Night

  Rounding the Mark

  The Patience of the Spire

  The Paper Moon

  August Heat

  The Wings of the Sphinx

  The Track of Sand

  The Potter’s Field

  The Age of Doubt

  The Dance of the Seagull

  Treasure Hunt

  Angelica’s Smile

  Game of Mirrors

  A Beam of Light

  A Voice in the Night

  A Nest of Vipers

  The Pyramid of Mud

  The Overnight Kidnapper

  The Other End of the Line

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Sellerio Editore

  Translation copyright © 2020 by Stephen Sartarelli

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in Italian as La rete di protezione by Sellerio Editore, Palermo.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Camilleri, Andrea, author. | Sartarelli, Stephen, 1954– translator.

  Title: The safety net / Andrea Camilleri ; translated by Stephen Sartarelli.

  Other titles: Rete di protezione. English

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2020] | Series: A Penguin mystery |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019037373 (print) | LCCN 2019037374 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134961 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506621 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ4863.A3894 R44413 2020 (print) | LCC PQ4863.A3894 (ebook) | DDC 853/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037373

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037374

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Andy Bridge

  Cover design by Paul Buckley

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Praise for Andrea Camilleri

  About the Author

  Also by Andrea Camilleri

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  1

  The alarm clock started ringing wildly.

  Eyes still closed, Montalbano reached out towards the nightstand with one hand and, feeling around, tried to turn it off, worried that the noise would wake up Livia, who was sleeping beside him.

  B
ut his fingers knocked into a glass that first tipped over and then fell to the floor.

  He cursed the saints. Then he immediately heard Livia giggle. He turned towards her.

  “Did the alarm—?”

  “No, I’d been awake for a while.”

  “Really? What were you doing?”

  “What do you mean what was I doing? I was waiting for daybreak and watching you.”

  Montalbano thought that the back of his head must constitute a rather boring landscape.

  “Did you know that lately you sometimes whistle in your sleep?” asked Livia.

  Upon hearing this revelation, Montalbano, for whatever reason, got irritated.

  “How could I know that if I’m asleep? Anyway, be more specific. What do I whistle, pop songs, opera, or what?”

  “Calm down! Are you offended or something? All right, to be more precise, you sometimes emit a kind of whistling sound.”

  “Through my nose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Next time, pay attention to whether I whistle through my nose or my mouth, and let me know.”

  “Why, does it make a difference?”

  “Yes, it makes a huge difference. I remember reading something once about a guy whose nose made a whistling sound and it later turned out to be a symptom of a deadly disease.”

  “Oh, come on! And, by the way, I had a bad dream.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “I’m sitting and reading on a veranda exactly like ours, except that it gives onto the docks at the port. At some point I hear this big commotion of voices, and I see a man crying for help and being chased by another man ordering him to stop. The guy running away has a scarf around his head, a bandanna, something tied under his chin. The man giving chase is wearing a large belt with a lot of sharp knives tucked into it. At a certain point the man being chased finds himself up against the broadside of a barge. He has a moment of hesitation, and the pursuer takes advantage of this to throw one of his knives, which strikes the man in the nape of the neck, plunges all the way through, and comes out the front of his throat, nailing him to the wood of the barge. Just horrible. So the pursuer stops and starts throwing more knives at the victim, tracing the outline of his body against the boat. Then he suddenly turns and takes a step towards me. But luckily at that point I woke up.”

  “We sort of overdid it last night with the baby octopus!” was Montalbano’s comment.

  “And did you dream anything?” Livia asked.

  At that moment the alarm went off. But how was that possible? It had rung just five minutes earlier!

  Head still numb with sleep, the inspector opened his eyes and immediately realized he was in bed. There was no Livia. She was at home, in Boccadasse. He’d dreamt the whole thing, including Livia’s dream.

  He got up, went into the kitchen, prepared his customary mug of coffee, then got into the shower. Moments later, he was sitting on the veranda, smoking a cigarette while drinking his coffee. The day promised to be a fine one. Everything looked freshly painted, so bright were the colors.

  He had no desire whatsoever to go into Vigàta, or into what at least had been Vigàta up until a few days earlier. Because in fact the town had put on a completely different face. It had been, well, thrown back in time, turned into the Vigàta of the 1950s.

  This irked Montalbano no end, because it all seemed so fake, as if he was attending a masked ball at Carnival.

  The whole business had begun some four or five months earlier, when TeleVigàta invited its viewers to search their homes for old Super 8 movies, which had been so popular around the middle of the previous century, and to send whatever they found to the studio offices. The television station would later integrate them into a program, a kind of “The Way We Were,” about what the town was like in the 1950s.

  For whatever reason, the initiative was a resounding success. Perhaps because the whole thing had become a kind of game for the townsfolk, who were having a ball seeing how time had transformed them or their children from toddlers who looked like beautiful little angels just descended from the heavens into toothless, hairless, sickly old geezers, and women who’d once been the light of the town into grannies good mostly for knitting socks.

  Then they discovered that all this to-do actually had a specific purpose: All the material gathered was to serve as a visual aid for a production crew that was coming to town to film what is commonly known as a TV movie.

  Without fail, a short while later the crew’s technicians arrived, half of them Swedish, half of them Italian.

  Now the strange thing about all this was that the group of Swedish technicians included some breathtakingly badass babes, who did a variety of odd jobs: as assistant set designers, sound technicians, stagehands, and so on . . . Which left the townsfolk a bit flabbergasted to see such beautiful women having to work, and wondering what the actresses would look like when they finally arrived.

  And indeed, when they actually did arrive, work in Vigàta came to a standstill.

  With the flimsiest of excuses, people would drop whatever they were doing and run to the movie set. Things got so bad that law enforcement was asked to keep the rubberneckers away. And law enforcement, in this case, naturally took the form of one Mimì Augello, who had been put in charge of the patrolmen protecting the film crew, with special attention given to the actresses.

  This, in short, reduced the staff at the station house basically to three people: the inspector, Fazio, and Catarella. Luckily it was a period of calm and nothing was happening.

  The Vigàta townscape had changed. Gone were the TV antennas, the rubbish bins, the neon signs. And there was nothing remaining of the shops and stores Montalbano knew so well.

  The inspector had had someone tell him the plot of the TV movie. The story was set, naturally, in the 1950s and involved a Swedish girl working as a bosun on a steamship from Kalmar who falls seriously ill during the sea journey and is admitted to the hospital in Montelusa.

  Once she recovers her health she goes down to Vigàta, to be near the port, and is taken in by a fisherman while she waits for her ship to return.

  Due to a series of setbacks, the return of her steamship is delayed, and in the meantime the Swedish girl falls in love with a youth from Vigàta and creates a life for herself in town, while nevertheless maintaining, deep in her heart, a secret hope that her ship will come back for her one day.

  And she keeps on nourishing this hope even after she gets married and has a child.

  Finally the day comes when the ship returns to harbor, and the young woman decides to board in secret, unbeknownst to her family. She arranges with a sailor to have him take her out to the ship in his boat, but at the last moment the Swedish girl changes her mind and turns back, to her home in Vigàta.

  When Montalbano heard this story, it sounded to him like a plagiarism of a beautiful story by Pirandello entitled “Far Away,” in which the main character is not a girl bosun but a Swedish sailor named Lars.

  But he didn’t say anything to anyone.

  As he was drinking his second coffee on the veranda, the phone rang. He went to answer. It was Ingrid.

  His Swedish friend had, for the occasion, become the official translator for the film crew.

  “Ciao, Salvo.”

  “What is it?”

  Ingrid didn’t appreciate the inspector’s blunt greeting.

  “Are you angry?”

  “I think the proper word would be ‘irritated.’”

  “I’m sorry for you. Don’t forget that you have to come to the sister cities ceremony between Vigàta and Kalmar tonight. It’s at eight o’clock sharp at city hall.”

  “Thanks for the reminder. I’m well aware that my presence is required.”

  “All right, then. See you later.”

  Well, wouldn’t you know that they would tak
e advantage of the ongoing circus to make the two towns sister cities!

  He heard his front door open and then close again.

  “Adelina! I’m still here!”

  “Matre santissima! Wha’ss wrong, Isspector? You no feeling so good?” asked Adelina, who’d come running.

  “No, no, I feel fine. Not a trace of fever, unfortunately. I wanted to ask you if my good suit has been ironed.”

  “Which one, sir? The rilly dark one that looks like a black seagull?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “Iss ready.”

  “Okay, thanks. And you needn’t cook anything for me this evening. I’ll be eating out.”

  * * *

  He pulled up outside the station but couldn’t go in because a truck was stopped right in front of the entrance. He could see Catarella waving his arms to get the driver to move it. But the driver, who was Swedish, pretended not to understand, all that vaunted Nordic civility be damned.

  Montalbano likewise pretended nothing was happening, got out of his car, and headed straight for the Caffè Castiglione, which hadn’t changed a whit since its foundation in 1890, where he ate a cannolo just to sweeten his morning. By the time he got back to the station, the truck was gone.

  * * *

  “Any news?” he asked Catarella upon entering.

  “Da nooz is cummin ’ard an’ fass, Chief! ’Ere was a truck parked ousside ’ere till jess a coupla minnits ago, an’ ’ey wannit a change the sign ’at says ‘Vigàta Police’ t’ say ‘Dance Hall.’”

  Montalbano said nothing and headed for his office, with Catarella following behind.

  “Chief, ya know I tink I know why ’ere’s no more fights or killin’s or rabberies in town.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Cuz in my ’pinion e’en the crooks’ve stopped crookin’ cuz ’ey’re all busy watchin’ the crew shootin’ the film in town. E’en a big-time dealer like Totò Savatteri, I seen ’im all slicked up an’ fancy, drivin’ a carritch onna set.”

  The carriage was probably stuffed full of drugs, thought Montalbano, but he didn’t want to burst Catarella’s bubble.