“Of course.”
“Well, I’ll say them to you over the phone, even though, as I said, I feel awkward doing so. And this probably isn’t the most appropriate moment, but I’m afraid you might find out from another source, like the newspapers. . . . You don’t know this, of course, but almost a year ago I put in a request for early retirement.” “Oh God, don’t tell me they—”
“Yes, they granted it.”
“But why do you want to retire?”
“Because I no longer feel in step with the world, and because I feel tired. To me, the betting service for soccer matches is still called Sisal.”
The inspector didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry, I don’t get it.”
“What do you call it?”
“Totocalcio.”
“You see? Therein lies the difference. A while ago, some journalist accused Montanelli of being too old, and as proof, he cited the fact that Montanelli still called Totocalcio Sisal, as he used to call it thirty years ago.” “But that doesn’t mean anything! It was only a wise-crack!”
“It means a lot, Montalbano, a lot. It means unconsciously holding on to the past, not wanting to see certain changes, even rejecting them. And I was barely a year away from retirement, anyway. I’ve still got my parents’ house in La Spezia, which I’ve been having refurbished. If you like, when you come to Genoa to see Miss Livia, you can drop in on us.” “And when are—”
“When am I leaving? What’s today’s date?”
“The twelfth of May.”
“I officially leave my job on the tenth of August.” The commissioner cleared his throat, and the inspector understood that they had now come to the second thing, which was perhaps harder to say.
“About the other matter . . .”
He was hesitant, clearly. Montalbano bailed him out.
“It couldn’t possibly be worse than what you just told me.”
“It’s about your promotion.”
“No!”
“Listen to me, Montalbano. Your position can no longer be justified. In addition, now that I’ve been granted early retirement, I’m not, well, in a strong bargaining position. I have to recommend your promotion, and there won’t be any obstacles.” “Will I be transferred?”
“There’s a ninety-nine percent chance of it. Bear in mind that if I didn’t recommend you for the appointment, with all your successes, the ministry might see that in a nega-tive light and could end up transferring you anyway, but without a promotion. Couldn’t you use a raise?” The inspector’s brain was running at full speed, smoking, in fact, trying to find a possible solution. He glimpsed one and pounced on it.
“And what if, from this moment on, I no longer arrested anyone?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean, what if I pretend not to solve any more cases, if I mishandle investigations, if I let slip—”
“—rubbish, Montalbano, the only thing you’re letting slip is idiocies. I just don’t understand. Every time I talk to you about promotion, you suddenly regress and start reason-ing like a child.”
o o o
He killed an hour lolling about the house, putting some books back on the shelf and dusting the glass over the five engravings he owned, which Adelina never did. He did not turn on the television. He looked at his watch: almost ten p.m. He got in his car and drove to Montelusa. The three cinemas were showing the Taviani brothers’ Elective Affinities, Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, and Travels with Goofy. Without the slightest hesitation, he chose the cartoons. The theater was empty. He went back to the man who had torn his ticket.
“There’s nobody there!”
“You’re there. What do you want, company? It’s late. At this hour, all the little kids are asleep. You’re the only one still awake.”
He had so much fun that, at one moment, he caught himself laughing out loud in the empty theater.
o o o
There comes a moment—he thought— when you realize your life has changed. But when did it happen? you ask yourself. And you have no answer. Unnoticed events kept accumulating until, one day, a transformation occurred—or perhaps they were perfectly visible events, whose importance and consequences, however, you never took into account. You ask yourself over and over, but the answer to that “when” never comes. As if it mattered!
Montalbano, for his part, had a precise answer to that question. My life changed, he would have said, on the twelfth of May.
o o o
Beside the front door to his house, Montalbano had recently had a small lamp installed that went on automatically when night fell. It was by the light of this lamp that he saw, from the main road, a car stopped in the clearing in front of the house.
He turned onto the small lane leading to the house, and pulled up a few inches from the other car. As he expected, it was a metallic gray BMW. Its license-plate number was am 237 gw.
But there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The man who’d driven it there was surely hiding somewhere nearby. Montalbano decided it was best to feign indifference. He stepped out of the car,whistling,reclosed the door,and saw somebody waiting for him. He hadn’t noticed him earlier because the man was standing on the far side of the car and was so small in stature that his head did not exceed the height of the car’s roof. Practically a midget, or not much more than one. Well dressed, and wearing small, gold-rimmed glasses.
“You’ve made me wait a long time,” the little man said, coming forward.
Montalbano, keys in hand, moved towards the front door.
The quasi-midget stepped in front of him, shaking a kind of identity card.
“My papers,” he said.
The inspector pushed aside the little hand holding the documents, opened the door, and went inside. The man followed behind him.
“I am Colonel Lohengrin Pera,” said the elf.
The inspector stopped dead in his tracks, as if someone had pressed the barrel of a gun between his shoulder blades.
He turned slowly around and looked the colonel up and down. His parents must have given him that name to compensate somehow for his stature and surname. Montalbano felt fascinated by the colonel’s little shoes, which he must surely have had made to measure; they wouldn’t even have fit in the “sottouomo” category, as the shoemakers called it—that is, for “sub-men.” And yet the services had enlisted him, so he must have been tall enough to make the grade. His eyes, however, behind the lenses, were lively, attentive, dangerous.
Montalbano felt certain he was looking at the brains behind the Moussa affair. He went into the kitchen, still followed by the colonel, put the mullets in tomato sauce that Adelina had made for him into the oven, and started setting the table, without once opening his mouth. On the table was a seven-hundred-page book he’d bought from a bookstall and had never opened. He’d been drawn by the title: The Metaphysics of Partial Being. He picked it up, stood on tiptoe, and put it on the shelf, pressing the button on the videocamera. As if somebody had said “roll ’em,” Colonel Lohengrin Pera sat down in the right chair.
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18
Montalbano took a good half hour to eat his mullets, either because he wanted to savor them as they deserved, or to give the colonel the impression that he didn’t give a flying fuck about what the man might have to say to him. He didn’t even offer him a glass of wine. He acted as if he were alone, to the point where he even once burped out loud. For his part, Lohengrin Pera, once he’d sat down, had stopped moving, limiting himself to staring at the inspector with beady, viperlike eyes. Only when Montalbano had downed a demitasse of espresso did the colonel begin to speak.
“You understand, of course, why I’ve come to see you.” The inspector stood up, went into the kitchen, placed the little cup in the sink, and returned.