How could he tell her he got drunk with Ingrid and it had completely slipped his mind?
“There was no way.”
“Why not?”
“I was busy.”
“With whom?”
Jeez, what a pain in the ass!
“What do you mean, with whom? With my men.”
“What were you doing?”
His balls were definitively broken.
“We were having a competition.”
“A competition?!”
“Yes, to see who could say the stupidest shit imaginable.”
“And you won, of course. You have no rivals in that field!”
And thus began the usual relaxing nightly squabble.
6
After the phone call, he no longer felt like going to bed. He went back out on the veranda and sat down. He needed to distract himself a little, to think about something that had nothing to do with either Livia or the horse case.
The night was calm but quite dark. He could barely see the slightly lighter line of the sea. Out on the water, directly in front of the veranda, was a jacklamp that in the darkness looked closer than it really was.
At once a taste of lightly fried sole came back to him, between the tongue and palate. He swallowed emptily.
He was ten years old when his uncle took him night-fishing with a jacklamp for the first and last time, after having pleaded with his wife for an entire evening.
“An’ what if the boy falls inna sea?”
“Whas got inna you’ head? If ’e falls inna sea, we fish ’im back out.There’s two of us, me ’n’ Ciccino, c’mon!”
“An’ what if ’e’s cold?”
“Gimme a sweater. If ’e’s cold, I’ll make ’im put it on.”
“An’ what if ’e feels sleepy?”
“He can sleep onna bottom o’ the boat.”
“An’ you, Salvuzzo, you wanna go?”
“Well . . .”
He wanted nothing more, every time his uncle went out to fish. At last his aunt consented, after giving him a thousand warnings.
That night, he remembered, was exactly like this one. Moonless.You could see all the lights along the coast.
At a certain point, Ciccino, the sixty-year-old seaman who was rowing the boat, had said:
“Turn it on.”
And his uncle had turned on the jacklamp. A sort of pale blue light, very powerful.
It gave him the impression that the sandy sea bottom had suddenly risen to the surface of the water, completely illuminated. He saw a school of tiny fish which, dazzled by the light, had suddenly frozen, staring at the jacklamp.
There were transparent jellyfish, a couple of fish that looked like snakes, and some kind of crab crawling along . . .
“You keep leaning out like that, you’ll fall in,” Ciccino said softly.
Spellbound, he hadn’t even realized he was bending so far out of the boat that his face was about to touch the water. His uncle was standing astern, holding the ten-pointed harpoon, its ten-foot shaft tied to his wrist with another ten feet of rope.
“Why,” he had asked Ciccino, also softly, so the fish wouldn’t flee, “are there two other harpoons in the boat?”
“One is for fishing by the rocks and the other is for the open sea. The first one’s got firmer prongs, and the other’s sharper.”
“And the one that Uncle’s got in his hand, what’s that?”
“That’s a sand harpoon. It’s for catching sole.”
“Where are they?”
“They’re hiding under the sand.”
“And how’s he see them if they’re under the sand?”
“The sole burrow just barely under the sand, so you can still see the little black dots of their eyes. Look, you can see ’em yourself.”
He squinted hard, but couldn’t see the little black dots.
Then he felt the boat give a jolt and heard the harpoon swoosh powerfully into the water, as his uncle said:
“Got ’im!”
At the end of the fork was a sole as big as his arm, struggling in vain. Two hours later, after he’d caught about ten big soles, his uncle decided to rest.
“Hungry?” Ciccino asked him.
“A little.”
“Shall I make you some?”
“All right.”
Boating the oars, the man opened a sack and pulled out a skillet and a little gas burner, along with a bottle of olive oil, a small bag of flour, and a smaller one of salt. He, the boy, watched the preparations, mystified. How could anyone eat at that hour of the night? Ciccino, meanwhile, had put the skillet on the burner, poured a bit of oil, covered two soles in flour, and began to fry them.
“What about you?” his uncle asked.
“I’ll make mine afterwards.They’re too big.Three won’t fit in the skillet.”
While waiting to eat, his uncle told him that the hard thing about harpoon fishing was refraction, and explained what this was. But he didn’t understand a thing; all he understood was that the fish looked like it was here, when in fact it was over there.
As soon as the sole began frying, the smell whetted his appetite. He held it over a sheet of newspaper as he ate it, burning his mouth and hands.
In the forty-six years that had passed since that night, he had never experienced the same taste again.
The Milanese Kill on Saturdays was the title of a book of short shories by Scerbanenco that he had read many years ago. And they killed on Saturdays because all the other days they were too busy working.
The Sicilians Don’t Kill on Sundays could, on the other hand, have been the title of a book that nobody had ever written.
Because on Sundays the Sicilians go to morning Mass with the whole family, then go pay a visit to the grandparents, where they stay for lunch; in the afternoon they watch the match on television and, in the evening, again with the whole family, they go out for ice cream.Where would they find the time to kill anyone on Sundays?
For this reason the inspector decided he would take his shower later than usual, certain he would not be disturbed by a phone call from Catarella.
He got up, opened the French doors. Not a cloud, not a breath of wind.
He went into the kitchen, made coffee, filled two cups, drank one in the kitchen, then took the other one into the bedroom. He took his cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray, set them down on the bedside table, and got back into bed, sitting up with two pillows behind his back.
He drank his coffee, savoring it drop by drop, then fired up a cigarette, taking the second drag with double satisfaction. The first satisfaction was the taste of the nicotine on top of that of the caffeine; and the second, the fact that if Livia had been lying beside him, she would have issued the inevitable injunction:
“Either you put out that cigarette, or I am leaving! How many times have I told you I don’t want you smoking in the bedroom?”
And he would have been forced to put it out.
Now, instead, he could smoke the whole fricking pack, and blow off the rest of creation.
“Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you gave a little thought to the investigation?” Montalbano One asked him.
“Would you just leave him in peace a moment?” Montalbano Two intervened, polemicizing with Montalbano One.
“For a policeman, Sunday is a workday like any other!”
“But even God rested on the seventh day!”
Montalbano pretended not to hear them and kept on smoking. When he’d finished the cigarette, he lay down in bed and tried closing his eyes again.
Little by little, his nostrils began to fill with an ever so faint scent, very sweet, a scent that immediately made him think of the naked Rachele in her bathtub . . .
Then he realized that Adelina hadn’t changed the pillowcase on which Ingrid had laid her head two nights before, and that his own body heat was now releasing the scent of her skin from the cloth.
He tried to put up with this for a few minutes, but failed and had to get out of bed to avoid some perilous uprisings in the southerly regions.