He dug it out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to Montalbano. The inspector opened it.
Esteemed Inspector, the person you know, my client and friend, had intended to write you a letter expressing his increased admiration in your regard. He changed his mind, however, and asked instead that I inform you he will be calling you by phone. Most respectfully yours, Guttadauro.
He tore it up into little pieces and went into Augello’s office. Mimi was at his desk.
“I’m writing the report,” he said.
“Fuck it,” said Montalbano.
“What’s going on?” Augello asked, alarmed. “I don’t like the look on your face.”
“Did you bring me the novel?”
“Sanfilippo’s? Yes.”
He pointed at a large envelope on the desk. The inspector picked it up and put it under his arm.
“What’s wrong?” Augello insisted.
The inspector didn’t answer.
“I’m going home to Marinella. Don’t let anyone call me there. I’ll be back at the station around midnight. I want you all here.”
17
Once outside the police station, his great desire to hole up at Marinella and start reading suddenly disappeared the way the wind sometimes does, uprooting trees one moment and vanishing the next, as if it had never existed. He got in his car and drove towards the port. When he arrived in the neighborhood, he stopped the car and got out, bringing along the envelope. The truth of the matter was that he couldn’t muster up the courage to read it: he was afraid of finding in Nenè Sanfilippo’s words a stinging confirmation of an idea that had occurred to him after Ingrid left. He walked slowly, deliberately, to the lighthouse and sat down on the flat rock. He smelled the strong, acrid odor of the lippo, the greeny down that grows on the lower half of the rocks, the part in contact with the sea. He glanced at his watch: there was still an hour of light remaining. He could, if he wanted, start reading right there. But he still didn’t feel like it; he wasn’t up to it. What if Sanfilippo’s writing turned out in the end to be a pile of shit, the constipated fantasy of a dilettante who thinks he can write a novel just because he learned how to parse sentences in school? Which isn’t even taught anymore, besides. Another sign—as if he needed any more—of just how far he was getting on in years. But to keep holding those pages in his hand, unable to decide one way or another, made his skin crawl. Maybe it was better to go back to Marinella and start reading on the veranda. He would be breathing the same sea air.
At a glance he realized that Nenè Sanfilippo, to hide what he really had to say, had resorted to the same method he used in filming the naked Vanya. In that instance the tape had begun with some twenty minutes of The Getaway; here the first pages were copied from a famous noveclass="underline" Asimov’s I, Robot.
It took Montalbano two hours to read the whole thing. The closer he got to the end, the clearer what Nenè Sanfilippo was saying became to him, and the more often his hand reached out for the whisky bottle.
The novel had no ending. It broke off in the middle of a sentence. But what he’d read was more than enough for him. From the pit of his stomach a violent spasm of nausea rose up and seized his throat. He ran to the bathroom, barely able to stand, knelt down in front of the toilet and started to vomit. He vomited the whisky he’d just drunk, vomited what he’d eaten that day as well as what he’d eaten the day before, and the day before that, and he felt, with his sweaty head now entirely inside the toilet bowl and a sharp pain in his side, as if he were endlessly vomiting up the entire time of his life on earth, going all the way back to the pap he was given as a baby, and when, at last, he’d expelled even his own mother’s milk, he kept on vomiting poison bitterness, bile, pure hatred.
He managed to stand up, holding on to the sink, but his legs could barely support him. He was sure he was getting a fever. He stuck his head under the open faucet.
“Too old for this profession,” he muttered.
He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.
He didn’t stay there long. When he got up his head was spinning, but the blind rage that had overwhelmed him was now turning into lucid determination. He called the office.
“Hallo? Hallo? This the Vigata Pol—”
“Montalbano here, Cat. Put Inspector Augello on, if he’s there.”
He was there.
“What is it, Salvo?”
“Listen to me carefully, Mimi. I want you and Fazio, right now, to take a car, not a squad car, mind you, and drive towards Santoli. I want to know if Dr. Ingrò’s villa is being watched.”
“By whom?”
“No questions, Mimi. If it’s being watched, it’s certainly not by us. And you must try to determine if the doctor is alone or with others. Take as long as you need to be sure of what you’re seeing. I summoned all the men for a midnight meeting. Cancel the order; it’s no longer necessary. When you’ve finished in Santoli, let Fazio go home and come to Marinella to tell me how things stand.”
He hung up and the telephone rang. It was Livia.
“How come you’re already home at this hour?” she asked.
She was pleased, but more than pleased, she was happily surprised.
“And if you know I’m never home at this hour, why did you call?”
He’d answered a question with a question. But he needed to stall. Otherwise Livia, knowing him as she did, would realize that something wasn’t right with him.
“You know, Salvo, for the last hour or so something strange has been happening to me. It’s never happened to me before, or at least, it’s never been so strong as now. It’s hard to explain.”
Now it was Livia who was stalling.
“Give it a try.”
“Well, it’s as though you were here.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“Okay. See, when I came home, I didn’t see my dining room, I saw yours. Not exactly, though; it was my room, of course, but at the same time, it was yours.”
“As in dreams.”
“Yes, something like that. And since that moment, it’s as though I’ve been split in two. I’m in Boccadasse, but at the same time I’m with you, in Marinella. It’s ... really beautiful. I called because I knew you’d be home.”
To hide his emotions, Montalbano tried to make a joke of it.
“The fact is, you’re curious.”
“About what?”
“About the layout of my house.”
“But I already ...” Livia reacted.
She broke off, suddenly remembering the little game he’d suggested they play: getting engaged, starting all over.
“I’d like to get to know it.”
“Why don’t you come?”
He’d been unable to control his tone, and a sincere question had come out. Livia took notice.
“What’s wrong, Salvo?”
“Nothing. A bad mood, it’ll pass. An ugly case.”
“Do you really want me to come?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll catch the afternoon flight tomorrow. I love you.”
He had to find a way to pass the time while waiting for Mimi. He didn’t feel like eating, even though he had emptied his guts of everything possible. His hand, as if of its own will, took a book off the shelf. He glanced at the title: The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad. He recalled having liked it, even a lot, but couldn’t remember anything else. It often happened that if he read the opening lines of a novel, or the conclusion, a little compartment in his memory would open up, and characters, situations, phrases would come tumbling out. “Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law.” That’s how the book began, but these words didn’t tell him anything. “He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.” These were the final words, and they said too much. Then a sentence from the book came back to him: “No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity ...” He hastily put the book back in its place. No, his hand had not acted by itself, independently of his mind; it had been guided, unconsciously of course, by him, by what was inside him. He sat down in the armchair and turned on the television. The first image he saw was of prisoners in a concentration camp, not one of Hitler‘s, but a contemporary one. It wasn’t clear where, because the faces of people subject to horror are the same everywhere. He turned it off. He went out on the veranda, sat there staring at the sea, trying to breathe with the same rhythm as the surf.