“Whenever you like.”
“Did you know that the Customs Police have found truck-loads of incriminating stuff in Peruzzo’s offices? Everybody thinks he’s screwed for good this time.”
o o o
He picked up the photographic enlargements that he’d had Cicco De Cicco make and put them in an envelope, which he managed, with some effort, to fit in his jacket pocket.
“Catarella!”
“Your orders, Chief.”
“Is Inspector Augello around?”
“No, Chief. He’s in Montelusa ’cause the c’mishner wants
’Specter Augello to be the inner-in-chief.” So the c’mishner had finally marginalized the inspector and was speaking only to Augello, the inner-in-chief.
“What about Fazio?”
“He ain’t here, neither, Chief. He went for a minnit over to Via Palazzolo, ’cross from the alimentary school.”
“What for?”
“There’s some shopkeeper who din’t wanna pay per-tection money shot at the guy who axed him for it but ’e missed.”
“So much the better.”
“Smuch the bitter, Chief, but t’make it up he got some guy who’s passin by in the arm.”
“Listen, Cat. I’m going home to resume my convalescence.”
“Straightaway straightaway?”
“Yes.”
“Can I come see you sometimes when I wanna see you sometimes?”
“Come whenever you like.”
o o o
Before returning to Marinella, he dropped in at the grocer’s where he sometimes got his provisions. He bought green olives, passuluna black olives, caciocavallo cheese, fresh bread sprinkled with giuggiulena, and a jar of Trapanese pesto.
Back at home, he set the table on the veranda while the pasta cooked. After shilly-shallying a bit, the day had finally surrendered to the late spring sunshine. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, not a breath of wind in the air. The inspector drained the pasta, dressed it with pesto, took the dish outside, and began to eat. A man was walking by along the water, and for a moment he stopped and stared at Montalbano on the veranda. What was so strange about him that a man should eye him as if he were a painting? Perhaps he really was a painting, one that might be titled: The Solitary Pensioner’s Lunch. The idea made him suddenly lose his appetite. He kept eating his pasta, but listlessly.
The telephone rang. It was Livia. She told him she’d made it back without incident, that everything was all right, she was cleaning her apartment, and would call him back that evening. A brief phone call, but long enough to let the pasta turn cold.
He didn’t feel like eating any more. A wave of black melancholy had come over him, conceding him only a glass of wine and a bit of giuggiulena bread. He tore off a piece, put it in his mouth, and with the index finger of his right hand began searching about for giuggiulena seeds that had fallen from the crust. He pressed them against the tablecloth with his fingertip until they stuck, then brought his finger to his mouth.
The joy of eating bread with giuggiulena lay primarily in this ritual.
Flush against the veranda’s right-hand wall—on the outside, that is—was a wild shrub that over time had grown in width and height to the point where it now came up to the level of someone sitting on the bench.
Livia had told him many times that they needed to uproot it, but this had become a difficult proposition. By now the shrub’s roots must have grown as thick and long as a tree’s.
Montalbano didn’t know why, but he suddenly had the urge to cut it down. He needed only turn his head a little to the right for the whole bush to enter his field of vision. The wild plant was reviving. Here and there amidst its yellow scrub a few green buds were beginning to emerge. Near the top, between two small branches, a silvery spiderweb sparkled in the sunlight. Montalbano was certain it hadn’t been there the day before, because Livia would have noticed and, with her fear of spiders, would have destroyed it with the broom. It must have been made during the night.
The inspector stood up and leaned over the railing to get a closer look at it.
Spellbound, the inspector counted some thirty threads in concentric circles that decreased in diameter as they approached the center. The distance between threads was the same throughout, except in the middle, where it greatly increased. The circu-lar weave, moreover, was held together by a regular sequence of radial threads that emanated from the center and stretched to the outermost circle of the web.
Montalbano guessed that there were about twenty radial threads of uniform distance from one another. The center of the web was made up of the points of convergence of all the threads, which were held together by a thread different from the rest and spiral in shape.
How patient that spider must have been!
It certainly must have encountered some difficulties. A gust of wind shredding the weave, an animal that happened to pass and move a branch . . . But no matter, the spider had carried on its nocturnal labor, determined to bring its web to completion, whatever the cost, obstinate, deaf and blind to all other stimuli.
But where was the spider? Try as he might, the inspector couldn’t see it. Had it already left, abandoning everything?
Had it been eaten by some other animal? Or was it lurking hidden under some yellow leaf, looking keenly around, with its eight eyes like a diadem, its eight legs ready to spring?
All at once, the web began ever so delicately to vibrate, to quiver. Not from any sudden breath of wind, for the nearest leaves, even the flimsiest, remained still. No, it was an artificial movement, created intentionally. And by what, if not the spider itself? Apparently the invisible arachnid wanted the web to be taken for something else—a veil of frost, a wisp of steam—and was moving the threads with its legs. It was a trap.
Montalbano turned back towards the table, picked up a tiny piece of bread, broke it up into even smaller crumbs, and threw them at the web. Too light, they scattered in the air, but one did get caught in the very middle of the web, right on the spiral thread, and stayed there for only a split second. It was there one moment and gone the next. Darting out like a flash from the upper part of the web—which remained hidden under some leaves—a grey dot had enveloped the breadcrumb and vanished. But more than actually witness this movement, the inspector had sensed it. The swiftness with which the grey dot had moved was astonishing. He decided he wanted a better look at the spider’s reaction. He took another crumb, rolled it into a tiny little ball slightly bigger than the last one, and hurled it right into the center of the web, which shook all over. The grey dot pounced again, arrived at the center, covered the bread with its body, but did not return to its hiding place. It held still, perfectly visible, in the middle of its admirable structure of airy geometries. To Montalbano it seemed as if the spider was looking at him, gloating in triumph.
Then, in nightmarishly slow succession, as in an endless cinematic fadeout and fade-in, the spider’s tiny head began to change color and form, going from grey to pink, its fuzz turning to hair, the eight eyes merging into two, until it looked like a minute human face, smiling with satisfaction at the booty it held tightly between its legs.
Montalbano shuddered in horror. Was he living a nightmare? Had he drunk too much wine without realizing it? All at once he remembered a passage in Ovid he’d studied at school, the one about Arachne the weaver, turned into a spider by Athena . . . Could time have started running backwards, all the way back to the dark night of myth? He felt dizzy, head spinning. Luckily that monstrous vision didn’t last long, for the image began at once to blur and reverse the transforma-tion. Yet before the spider turned back into a spider, before it vanished again amidst the leaves, Montalbano had enough time to recognize the face. And, no, it wasn’t Arachne’s. He was sure of that.