o o o
An hour before midnight, he made sure Livia was sleeping profoundly, then he unplugged the phone, gathered together all the loose change he could find, turned off the lights, and went out. He drove to the telephone booth in the parking lot of the Marinella Bar.
“Nicolò? Montalbano here. A couple of things. Tomorrow morning, around midday, send somebody along with a cameraman to the neighborhood of police headquarters.
There are some new developments.”
“Thanks. What else?”
“I was wondering, do you have a very small videocamera, one that doesn’t make any noise? The smaller the better.”
“You want to leave posterity a document of your prowess in bed?”
“Do you know how to use this camera?”
“Of course.”
“Then bring it to me.”
“When?”
“As soon as you’ve finished your midnight news report.
But don’t ring the doorbell when you get here, Livia’s asleep.”
o o o
“Hello, is this the prefect of Trapani? Please excuse me for calling so late. This is Corrado Menichelli of the Corriere della Sera. I’m calling from Milan. We recently got wind of an extremely serious development, but before publishing our report on it, we wanted to confirm a few things with you personally, since they concern you directly.” “Extremely serious? What is this about?”
“Is it true that pressure was put on you to accommodate a certain Tunisian journalist during his recent visit to Mazàra? I advise that you think a moment before answering, in your own interest.” “I don’t need to think for even a second!” the prefect exploded. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember? That’s very odd, you know, since this all happened barely three weeks ago.”
“None of this ever happened! No pressure was ever put on me! I don’t know anything about any Tunisian journalists!”
“Mr. Prefect, we have proof that—”
“You can’t have proof of something that never happened!
Let me speak immediately to the editor-in-chief !” Montalbano hung up. The prefect of Trapani was sincere; the head of his cabinet, on the other hand, was not.
o o o
“Valente? Montalbano here. I just spoke with the prefect of Trapani; I was pretending to be a reporter for the Corriere della Sera. He doesn’t know anything. The whole thing was set up by our friend, Commendator Spadaccia.” “Where are you calling from?”
“Not to worry. I’m calling from a phone booth. Now here’s what we should do next, providing that you agree.” To tell him, he spent every last piece of change but one.
o o o
“Mimì? Montalbano here. Were you sleeping?”
“No, I was dancing. What the fuck did you expect?”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Hell, yes! After the position you put me in!”
“Me? What position?”
“Sending me to take away the kid. Livia looked at me with hatred. I had to tear him out of her arms. It made me feel sick to my stomach.”
“Where’d you take François?”
“To Calapiàno, to my sister’s.”
“Is it safe there?”
“Very safe. She and her husband have a great big house with a farm, three miles from the village, very isolated. My sister has two boys, one of them the same age as François.
He’ll be fine there. It took me two and a half hours to get there, and two and a half to drive back.”
“Tired, eh?”
“Very tired. I won’t be in tomorrow morning.”
“All right, you won’t be in, but I want you at my house, in Marinella, by nine at the latest.”
“What for?”
“To pick Livia up and drive her to the Palermo airport.”
“Okay.”
“How come you’re suddenly not so tired anymore, eh, Mimì?”
o o o
Livia was now having a troubled sleep, groaning from time to time. Montalbano closed the bedroom door, sat down in the armchair, and turned on the television at very low volume.
On TeleVigàta, Galluzzo’s brother-in-law was saying that the Foreign Ministry in Tunis had issued a statement regarding some erroneous information about the unfortunate killing of a Tunisian fisherman aboard an Italian motor trawler that had entered Tunisian waters. The statement denied the wild rumors according to which the fisherman was not, in fact, a fisherman, but the rather well-known journalist Ben Dhahab.
It was an obvious case of two men with the same name, since Ben Dhahab the journalist was alive and well and still working. In the city of Tunis alone, the statement went on to say, there are more than twenty men named Ben Dhahab. Montalbano turned off the television. So the tide had started to turn, and people were running for cover, raising fences, putting up smoke screens.
o o o
He heard a car pull up and stop in the clearing in front of the house. The inspector rushed to the door to open up. It was Nicolò.
“I got here as fast as I could,” he said, entering.
“Thanks.”
“Livia’s asleep?” the newsman asked, looking around.
“Yes. She’s leaving for Genoa tomorrow morning.”
“I’m so sorry I won’t have a chance to say good-bye to her.”
“Nicolò, did you bring the videocamera?”
The newsman reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gadget no larger than four packs of cigarettes stacked two by two.
“Here you are. I’m going home to bed.”
“No you’re not. First you have to hide this somewhere it won’t be visible.”
“How am I going to do that, if Livia’s sleeping in the next room?”
“Nicolò, I don’t know why you’ve got it into your head that I want to film myself fucking. I want you to set up the camera in this room.”
“Tell me what it is you want to film.”
“A conversation between me and a man sitting exactly where you are now.”
Nicolò looked straight ahead and smiled.
“Those shelves full of books seem like they were put there for that very purpose.”
Taking a chair from the table, he set it next to the bookcase and climbed up on it. He shuffled a few books, set up the camera, sat back down where he was before, and looked up.
“From here you can’t see it,” he said, satisfied. “Come and check for yourself.”
The inspector checked.
“That seems fine.”
“Stay there,” said Nicolò.
He climbed back up on the chair, fussed about, and got back down.
“What’s it doing?” asked Montalbano.
“Filming you.”
“Really? It makes no noise at all.”
“I told you the thing’s amazing.”
Nicolò repeated his rigmarole of climbing onto the chair and stepping back down. But this time he had the camera in his hand and showed it to Montalbano.
“Here’s how you do it, Salvo. To rewind the tape, you press this button. Now bring the camera up to your eye and press this other button. Go ahead, try.”
Montalbano did as he was told and saw a very tiny image of himself ask in a microscopic voice: “What’s it doing?” Then he heard Nicolò’s voice say, “Filming you.”
“Fantastic,” the inspector said. “There’s one thing, though. Is that the only way to see what you’ve filmed?”
“Of course not,” Nicolò replied, taking out a normal-looking videocassette that was made differently inside.
“Watch what I do. I remove the tape from the videocamera, which as you can see is as small as the one in your answering machine, and I slip it inside this one, which is made for this purpose and can be used in your VCR.” “Listen, to make it record, what do I do?”