Game of Mirrors Page 9

  The inspector looked at Fazio, who remained expressionless. He’d come this far, might as well go all the way . . . He decided to play along.

  “All right, I’ll be there. Ciao.”

  He hung up. Fazio looked at him questioningly.

  “She wants to put on a little show with me, you see? So that half the people in town think we have a close relationship, maybe even an intimate one. That way she can make it seem like she doesn’t have another man—namely, Arturo.”

  “All right. But who are they trying to hide from? Who are they afraid of? Certainly not the husband. And Arturo’s not married.”

  “And why am I going to dinner at her place tonight? To try and find out just that.”

  When he got to the stop, the bus hadn’t arrived yet, so he stepped out of the car to smoke a cigarette. There were already about ten people waiting for the bus, which after a fifteen-minute stop would depart again for Montelusa.

  The stage was set.

  The first thing Liliana did when she got off the bus was to run towards him with open arms and cries of joy, embrace him, and kiss him on the cheeks.

  So that Montalbano was immediately hated by the three or four men who witnessed the scene.

  Then the show began.

  At the baker’s she held him arm in arm the whole time. At the grocer’s she kept an arm around his waist the whole time. At the butcher’s she found a way to steal a kiss.

  “I’m done.”

  “I’d like to buy some cannoli myself.”

  “All right, I’ll come too.”

  She didn’t want to miss the chance. She made it so that when they entered the café they were holding hands, with her looking at him as if he were Sean Connery in the days of 007.

  Montalbano thought she could have saved time and effort by publishing an ad announcing to one and all that they were lovers.

  “And now you’re going to drive me home and go back to your place, and we’ll see each other again at nine, not before.”

  “Okay.”

  He felt half amused, half annoyed. Amused because he wanted to see how far Liliana would take this dangerous game, and annoyed because she apparently took him for a complete moron ready to damn himself at the mere sight of her thighs.

  The phone rang, and he went to pick up. It was Nicolò Zito.

  “Salvo, I tried you at the station but they said you were at home and so . . . Am I bothering you?”

  “No, Nicolò. What is it?”

  “I don’t know where to begin . . .”

  “Is it something serious?”

  “I dunno. Listen, I’m going to ask you a question, but I don’t want you to think I’m crazy.”

  “I won’t.”

  “If I hadn’t called you right now but, say, three or four hours from now, would I be bothering you?”

  What had got into the guy? What kind of question was that?

  “I probably wouldn’t have answered the phone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I would have been out. I have to go and see someone.”

  “Male or female?”

  But what did it matter to Zito? Nicolò, however, was too good a friend; there must be something behind this phone call.

  “Female.”

  “Far from Marinella?”

  “No, just a stone’s throw from my house.”

  “Listen, don’t take this the wrong way . . . Just asking you these questions is making me sweat . . . Is this some sort of . . . well, amorous tryst?”

  “Nicolò, this is where I stop talking. Now it’s your turn.”

  “I have to tell you something I found out by chance from my cameraman . . . He’s friends with another cameraman who works for TeleVigàta, and tonight they were supposed to go out dancing . . . but the guy called my colleague to say he couldn’t make it tonight, because he had to cover an important story, a real scoop, somewhere around Marinella . . .”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know why, but I thought it might concern you . . . You’re the only person living in Marinella who could possibly be of any interest to the folks at TeleVigàta.”

  “Thanks, Nicolò. You’re a real friend.”

  He hung up, feeling a slight bitter taste in his mouth. Part of him believed it, and part of him didn’t. But shouldn’t he probably protect himself regardless?

  He rang Fazio.

  They talked a long time.

  And they came up with a plan.

  The gate was closed. She came and opened it, then took care to close it again. She was wearing a dress that looked like the winner of a contest to see which dressmaker could use the least amount of fabric and still make a dress.

  Even though there were no onlookers, she kissed him on the mouth and led him inside, holding him by the hand.

  She was smiling and stepping so lightly she seemed to be flying.

  A picture of true happiness.

  As might be expected, she had set the table on the veranda.

  But there was a lot more light outside than the previous time, which was disturbing.

  Liliana intercepted Montalbano’s glance at the wall sconce and explained.

  “The bulb burned out and all I could find in the house was this hundred-watt bulb.”

  So while we’re eating, thought the inspector, the mosquitoes will be eating us.

  They didn’t sit across from one another. Liliana had put out two chairs side by side.

  “This way I can look out at the sea, too,” she said.

  Not far from shore there was a boat with two fishermen on it. What on earth could they have been fishing for at this hour so close to the beach?

  It was very hot outside.

  The tête-à-tête got off to an unromantic start. As they were looking at each other and smiling, Montalbano suddenly slapped Liliana’s left shoulder, and she immediately followed with a quick cuff to the side of the inspector’s head.

  The first two mosquitoes had fallen on the field of battle, but reinforcements by the thousands were on their way.

  They were barely halfway through the antipasti and Liliana’s bare shoulders and arms were already covered with pink mosquito bites. They couldn’t go on this way.

  “Listen,” said Montalbano, “I think all the mosquitoes in the province are gathering here. The light is too bright. I should go and get another light bulb from my house, or else replace this one with something from your dining room.”

  “Just turn it off,” Liliana said with irritation.

  Montalbano obeyed. As a result, they were plunged into total darkness, so that they barely knew where their mouths were anymore. The inspector felt like laughing.

  How was Liliana going to remedy the situation, which was threatening to turn into a farce?

  “The only solution is to move everything into the dining room,” she finally suggested, reluctantly.

  Apparently the dining room was not the preferred battlefield for her war plans.

  And so they started going back and forth, carrying bottles, dishes, glasses, silverware, tablecloth, and napkins.

  On his last journey out to the veranda, Montalbano noticed that the two fishermen were pulling their boat ashore. Maybe they’d figured they wouldn’t catch any more fish that evening.

  9

  Inside the house, however, the heat was almost unbearable. They finished the antipasti with the help of some ice-cold white wine, which went down like a dream.

  The wine gave Liliana the strength to make an attempt to end the stalemate.

  “It pains me just to look at you,” she said at one point, smiling. “How can you stand it? Take off your jacket and unbutton your shirt, or you’re going to melt like a ball of ice cream.”

  It wasn’t true. The inspector would hardly have broken a sweat eve
n at the equator, but he concurred.

  “You’re right. Thanks,” he said.

  He remained in shirtsleeves with his collar unbuttoned. And what was she going to do now? Start some sort of game of strip poker?

  Since she wasn’t doing anything, he decided to provoke her.

  “And what about you?”

  “I can still hold out as I am.”

  She was saving her secret moves for later, when the atmosphere would be more conducive.

  She got up from the table and brought back a platter of pasta in salmon sauce.

  Montalbano’s heart gave a flutter. If the pasta was overcooked, he would be unable to swallow it. Instead, to his relief, he immediately found that, while not superb, the pasta was at least edible.

  And it helped them to polish off a second bottle of wine.

  Eating the pasta hadn’t been easy, however, since every so often, as he was bringing a forkful to his mouth, Liliana would suddenly grab his hand, bring it to her lips, and kiss the back of it.

  When they were done, Montalbano helped her bring the empty plates and silverware into the kitchen.

  For the second course, she’d prepared two slices of beef in a hot sauce that he’d never tasted before.

  The spicy sauce called for more wine. Montalbano couldn’t tell whether Liliana was beginning to feel its effects or was just pretending.

  First came the giggles.

  “Your moustache. . . . heeheehee! . . . Look at this little crumb . . . heeheehee!”

  Then she dropped her fork and the inspector bent down to pick it up.

  As he was crouching, she put her naked foot on his back, between the shoulder blades.

  “I dub thee knight of my . . .”

  Montalbano never found out what sort of honor she was bestowing on him because she started to fall out of her chair and didn’t finish her sentence.

  But she pulled herself quickly back up, announcing that she couldn’t stand the heat any longer and had to change her clothes because her sweat-dampened little dress was bothering her.

  “I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said, heading for the bedroom door.

  But after taking three steps, she turned around, approached Montalbano, who in the meantime had stood up out of politeness, wrapped her arms around his waist, put her mouth on his, and pressed it there, opening her lips ever so slowly.

  The kiss was a long one.

  To say that Montalbano went along with it only out of his sense of duty as a policeman would have been stretching things.

  In fact, his body started to act the way the Garibaldini were said to have acted when they sprang to the attack before the general had ever given the order.

  His hands, for example, independently of his will, descended as far as the young woman’s posterior globes.

  She then took him by the hand and, staggering slightly, led him into the bedroom.

  She turned on the light. The window was open.

  In a flash she’d taken off her little dress. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and had on a purely hypothetical pair of panties.

  She lay down on the bed and opened her arms toward Montalbano, smiling.

  At this point Montalbano realized he was utterly lost.

  His right foot made one step towards the bed, despite the fact that his brain was ordering him with all its authority to stay put and not move.

  The left foot followed its colleague with equal enthusiasm.

  Only divine intervention could save him now from the abyss into which he was about to plummet.

  “Come on! What are you waiting for?”

  The immediate effect of her voice was to induce the inspector to leap forward, in that both his feet responded simultaneously to the invitation.

  Probably only Saint Anthony could have resisted.

  And Saint Anthony, heeding the call, promptly intervened.

  Montalbano’s cell phone, which he’d transferred from his jacket to his trouser pocket, started to ring.

  The return to reality was so violent that the inspector gave a sort of cry of pain.

  It was Fazio.

  “We caught ’em and are bringing ’em in to the station,” he said. “Now you can pick up where you left off, if you want.”

  Was there a note of sarcasm in his last statement?

  “No, I’ll be right over,” said Montalbano.

  Then, turning to Liliana: “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

  “Are you crazy? Do you really mean that?”

  Liliana had sat up and was glaring at him so intensely that if he’d kept still for another second he would have caught fire.

  He didn’t answer, but merely ran and grabbed his jacket, jumped down from the veranda, bounded across the beach to his house, got in the car, started it up, and drove off.

  It took him little more than a quarter of the time it usually took him to go from his house to the station, but he wasn’t sure whether he was driving so fast because he wanted to escape Liliana or because he was so anxious to interrogate the two suspects.

  While waiting for him, Fazio paced back and forth in the station parking lot, which was practically deserted.

  The inspector gave him a questioning look.

  “It’s too hot inside,” Fazio explained.

  “So where are they?”

  “We put them in a holding cell. I sent Gallo home to bed.”

  “You did the right thing. Did they give you any trouble?”

  “The usual sort of stuff.”

  “Where’d you nab them?”

  “Right outside the bedroom window. They’d climbed over the gate.”

  Montalbano marveled.

  “Right outside the window? How come I didn’t hear anything?”

  Fazio answered a bit awkwardly.

  “Well, we made some noise, Chief, but you were . . . I think your thoughts were elsewhere at that moment.”

  Good thing there wasn’t much light in the parking lot, or Fazio would have noticed that the inspector was blushing.

  They went inside, to Montalbano’s office. Right in the middle of his desk, in full view, was a brand new video camera.

  “They filmed you with this,” said Fazio. “If you want to see yourself . . . it’s got a built-in monitor.”

  Montalbano’s blood froze. Did he really have to see himself playing the star of a tacky porno flick? The Inspector and the Deep-Throat Femme Fatale . . . Wet Investigations . . . He felt too out of breath to say yes.

  So he just nodded assent, as his legs were giving out from under him, and he collapsed in a chair.

  Fazio, pretending not to notice his discomfort, came up to him and set the video cam down in front of him.

  “You ready?”

  “Y . . . es.”

  Fazio pushed a button.

  The filming started at the moment Liliana turned on the bedroom light.

  As soon as she took off her dress and lay down in bed, the motherfucking sonofabitch of a cameraman zoomed in on the inspector’s face.

  Oscar for Best Actor.

  His expression was a cross between that of a starving dog being shown a piece of meat and that of chaste Joseph trying to escape the clutches of Potiphar’s wife.

  As his eyes were about to pop out of their sockets, his lips moved like those of a small child about to start crying.

  To say he looked ridiculous wouldn’t be saying enough. If these images had been broadcast, all of Vigàta would be laughing behind his back.

  But he didn’t have to drink the bitter cup down to the dregs. The filming stopped just as he was taking his first step towards the bed like a robot starting up.

  Matre santa, how embarrassing!

  Good thing they hadn’t filmed the kiss in the dining room!

  “Have you . . .�
�� he began.

  The voice that came out of his mouth sounded bizarre, like that of a turkey-cock. He cleared his throat and started over.

  “Have you identified them?”

  “Yessir. The cameraman’s name is Marcello Savagnoli and his assistant is Amedeo Borsellino. They both work full-time for TeleVigàta. You want me to bring them in here?”

  Would he be able to control himself and not start punching them and kicking them in the balls?

  Maybe, maybe not. Whatever the case, he could try.

  “All right.”

  Savagnoli—medium height, open shirt, gold crucifix in a thicket of chest hair, gold bracelet—had the face of a scoundrel, while Borsellino looked genuinely scared.

  Before anyone said anything, the cameraman sat down and sneered at Montalbano.

  “One at a time,” the inspector said to Fazio. “I’ll interrogate Borsellino afterwards.”

  As Fazio was going out with the assistant, Montalbano stood up, went over to Savagnoli, and, smiling affably, said:

  “Would you please stand up?”

  As soon as the man was on his feet, he dealt him a swift kick in the balls. Savagnoli gasped for air and fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes, writhing and groaning.

  “Not a peep!” Montalbano threatened.

  Then he went and sat back down.

  “What happened?” asked Fazio, coming in.

  “Dunno,” the inspector said with a cherubic face. “He must have had a sudden bellyache. Sit him back down and give him a glass of water.”

  When Savagnoli recovered, his attitude had entirely changed. He kept his eyes lowered, was sweating, and no longer looked like a scoundrel.

  “How did you catch them without their noticing?” the inspector asked Fazio.

  They’d already prearranged part of the answer to the question before he went to Liliana’s. But he wanted Savagnoli to hear it.

  “We were just conducting our routine evening patrol,” Fazio began, “when we saw two individuals scale the gate to a house in Marinella, enter the yard, and position themselves outside an open window. We waited and watched, out of view, to see what they were doing. And we finally intervened when we saw that they were secretly filming what was going on inside that room.”