"And so I appeal directly to you, Inspector Montalbano. Is it not true that there must be more to this story than meets the eye?" the newsman asked, closing his report.
Hearing himself personally addressed and seeing Zitos eyes looking out at him from the screen as he was eating, Montalbano let the wine he was drinking go down the wrong way and started coughing and cursing.
After finishing his meal, he put on his bathing suit and dived into the sea. It was freezing cold, but the swim brought him back to life.
...
"Now tell me exactly how it all happened," said the commissioner.
After admitting the inspector into his office, he had stood up and gone right over to him, embracing him warmly.
One thing about Montalbano was that he was incapable of deceiving or stringing along people he knew were honest or who inspired his admiration. With crooks and people he didn't like, he could spin out the flimflam with the straightest of faces and was capable of swearing he'd seen the moon trimmed in lace. The fact that he not only admired his superior, but had actually at times spoken to him as to a father, now put him, after the others command, in a state of agitation: he blushed, began to sweat, kept squirming in his chair as if he were under cross-examination. The commissioner noticed his uneasiness but attributed it to the discomfort that Montalbano genuinely felt whenever he had to talk about a particularly successful operation. The commissioner had not forgotten that at the last press conference, in front of the TV cameras, the inspector had expressed himself, if you could call it that, in long, painful stammerings at times devoid of common meaning, eyes bulging, pupils dancing as if he were drunk.
"I'd like some advice, before I begin."
"At your service."
"What should I write in the report?"
"What kind of question is that? Have you never written a report before? In reports you write down what happened," the commissioner replied curtly, a bit astonished. And since Montalbano hadn't yet made up his mind to speak, he continued. "In other words, you say you were able to take advantage of a chance encounter and turn it into a successful police operation, skillfully, courageously, it's true, but.."
"Look, I just wanted to say."
"Let me finish. I can't help but notice that you took a big risk, and exposed your men to grave danger you should have asked for substantial reinforcements, taken due precaution. Luckily, it all went well. But it was a gamble. That's what I'm trying to tell you, in all sincerity. Now lets hear your side."
Montalbano studied the fingers on his left hand as if they had just sprouted spontaneously and he didn't know what they were there for.
"What's wrong?" the commissioner asked.
"What's wrong is that it's all untrue!" Montalbano burst out. "There wasn't any chance encounter. I went to talk with Tano because he had asked to see me. And at that meeting we made an agreement."
The commissioner ran his hand over his eyes.
"An agreement?"
"Yes, on everything."
And while he was at it, he told him the whole story, from Gege phone call to the farce of the arrest.
"Is there anything else?" the commissioner asked when it was over.
"Yes. Thing's being what they are, in no way do I deserve to be promoted to assistant commissioner. If I were promoted, it would be for a lie, a deception."
"Let me be the judge of that," the commissioner said brusquely.
He got up, put his hands behind his back, and stood there thinking a moment. Then he made up his mind and turned around.
"Here's what well do. Write me two reports."
"Two?" said Montalbano, mindful of the effort it normally cost him to apply ink to paper.
"Don't argue. The fake report I'll leave lying around for the inevitable mole who will make sure to leak it to the press or to the Mafia. The real one I'll put in the safe."
He smiled.
"And as for this promotion business, which seems to be what terrifies you most, come to my house on Friday evening and we'll talk it over a little more calmly. My wife has invented a fabulous new sauce for sea bream."
...
Cavaliere Gerlando Misuraca, who carried his eighty-four years belligerently, was true to form, going immediately on the offensive as soon as the inspector said, "Hello?"
"Who is that imbecile who transferred my call?"
"Why, what did he do?"
"He couldn't understand my surname! He couldn't get it into that thick head of his! Bizugaga, he called me!"
He paused warily, then changed his tone:
"Can you assure me, on your word of honor, that he's just some poor bastard who doesn't know any better?"
Realizing that it was Catarella who had answered the phone, Montalbano could reply with conviction.
"I can assure you. But why, may I ask, do you need my assurance?"
"Because if he meant to make fun of me or what I represent, I'll be down there at the station in five minutes and will give him such a thrashing, by God, he won't be able to walk!"
And just what did Cavaliere Misuraca represent? Montalbano wondered while the other continued threatening to do terrible things. Nothing, absolutely nothing from a, so to speak, official point of view. A municipal employee long since retired, he did not hold nor had he ever held any public office, being merely a card-carrying member of his party. A man of unassailable honesty, he lived a life of dignified quasi-poverty. Even in the days of Mussolini, he had refused to seek personal gain, having always been a faithful follower, as one used to say back then. In return, from 1935 onwards, he had fought in every war and been in the thick of the worst battles. He hadn't missed a single one, and indeed seemed to have a gift for being everywhere at once, from Guadalajara, Spain, to Birel Gobi in North Africa by way of Axum, Ethiopia. Followed by imprisonment in Texas, his refusal to cooperate, and an even harsher imprisonment as a result, on nothing but bread and water. He therefore represented, Montalbano concluded, the historical memory of what were, of course, historic mistakes, but he had lived them with a faith and paid for them with his own skin: among several serious injuries, one had left him lame in his left leg.
"Tell me," Montalbano had mischievously asked him one day face-to-face, "if youd been able, would you have gone to fight at alongside the Germans and the repubblichini?" In his way, the inspector was sort of fond of the old Fascist. How could he not be? In that circus of corrupters and corrupted, extortionists and grafters, bribe-takers, liars, thieves, and perjurersturning up each day in new combinations Montalbano had begun to feel a kind of affection for people he knew to be incurably honest.
At this question, the old man had seemed to deflate from within, the wrinkles on his face multiplying as his eyes began to fog over. Montalbano then understood that Misuraca had asked himself the same question a thousand times and had never been able to come up with an answer. So he did not insist.
"Hello? Are you still there?" Misuracas peevish voice asked.
"At your service, Cavaliere."
"I just remembered something. Which is why I didn't mention it when I gave my testimony."
"I have no reason to doubt you, Cavaliere. I'm all ears."
"A strange thing happened to me when I was almost in front of the supermarket, but at the time I didn't pay it much mind. I was nervous and upset because these days there are certain bastards about who.."
"Please come to the point, Cavaliere."
If one let him speak, Misuraca was capable of taking his story back to the foundation of the first Fascist militias.
"Actually, I cant tell you over the phone. I need to see you in person. Its something really big, if I saw right."
The old man was considered someone who always told things straight, without overstating or understating the case.
"Is it about the robbery at the supermarket?"
"Of course."
"Have you already discussed it with anybody?"