“What do you want?” he asked, frightened.
The bathwater had suddenly turned ice cold. With his left hand, Angelo gestured for him to wait, then brought his hand to his mouth and pulled out a pair of panties. He took two steps forward.
“Open your mouth!” he ordered.
Clenching his teeth, Montalbano shook his head. Never in a million years would he let him stick those panties in his mouth. They were still wet with the spittle of that entity, who, being a corpse, had no right, logically speaking, to be threatening him with a gun. Or even to walk, if one really thought about it. Although, all things considered, he still looked pretty well preserved, given the fact that it had been many days since the murder. Whatever the case, it was clear that he now found himself in a trap laid by Michela to abet her brother in some shady affair of his.
“Are you going to open up or not?”
He shook his head again, and the other man fired. A deafening blast.
Montalbano jolted awake and sat up in bed, heart racing at a gallop, body covered in sweat. The shutter, blown by the wind, had slammed against the wall, and outside, in fact it was storming.
It was five o’clock in the morning. By nature the inspector didn’t believe in premonitions, forebodings, or anything to do with paranormal phenomena in general. Normality itself seemed already sufficiently abnormal to him. There was, however, one thing he was convinced of: that sometimes his dreams were nothing other than the paradoxical or fantastical elaborations of a line of reasoning he’d begun to follow in his head before falling asleep. And as for the interpretation of these dreams, he had more faith in the self-appointed interpreters of Lotto numbers than in Sigmund Freud.
So what did that muddle of a dream mean?
After half an hour of turning it over and over in his mind, he managed to isolate two elements that seemed important to him.
One concerned Angelo’s keys. The first set was still in his possession, after the crime lab had returned them to him. The other set, the one he’d had Michela give him, he’d given back to her. All this seemed normal, and yet something about those keys had set his brain going, something that didn’t add up and which he couldn’t bring into focus. He would have to give this more thought later.
The other element was a word, “present,” that Michela had said to him before leaving the bathroom. When Michela had actually spoken to him about presents, however, it had always been in reference to the expensive gifts Angelo gave to Elena …
Stop right there, Montalbano. You’re getting warm, warmer, warmer, hot, hot! You’re there! Shit, you’re there!
He felt such immense satisfaction that he grabbed the alarm clock, pushed down the button that turned off the alarm, laid his head down on the pillow, and fell immediately asleep.
Elena opened the door. She was barefoot and wearing the dangerous half-length housecoat she’d had on the previous time, face still dotted with a few drops of water from the shower she’d just taken. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and she must have woken up not long before that. She smelled so strongly of young, fresh skin that it seemed un-bearable to the inspector. Upon seeing him she smiled, took his hand, and, still holding it, pulled him inside, closed the door, and led him into the living room. “Coffee’s ready,” she said.
Montalbano had barely sat down when she reappeared with the tray. They drank their coffee without speaking.
“You want to know something strange, Inspector?” asked Elena, setting down her empty demitasse.
“Tell me.”
“A little while ago, when you phoned to tell me you were coming by, I felt happy. I missed you.”
Montalbano’s heart did exactly what an airplane does when it hits an air pocket. But he said nothing, pretended to concentrate on his last sip of coffee, and set his demitasse down as well.
“Any news?” she asked.
“A little,” the inspector said cautiously.
“I, on the other hand, have none,” said Elena.
Montalbano made an inquisitive face. He didn’t understand the meaning of those words. Elena started laughing heartily.
“What a funny face you just made! I only meant that for the last two days Emilio hasn’t stopped asking me if there’s any news, and I keep saying, ‘No, there’s no news.’ “
Montalbano was not convinced. Elena’s explanation only confused matters; it didn’t clarify them.
“I didn’t know your husband was so interested in the case.”
Elena laughed even harder.
“He’s not interested in the case, he’s interested in me.” “I don’t understand.”
“Inspector, Emilio wants to know if I’ve already taken steps to replace Angelo, or if I’m intending to do so at any time soon.”
So that’s what this was all about! The old pig was apparently in crisis, with no more lewd stories being told to him by his wife. Montalbano decided to give her a little rope.
“Why haven’t you?”
He was expecting her to laugh again, but Elena turned serious.
“I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings, and I want to feel at peace. I’m waiting for the investigation to be over.” She smiled again. “So you should hurry up.”
And why would a new relationship with another man create misunderstandings? He got the answer to his question when his gaze met hers. That wasn’t a woman sitting in the armchair in front of him, but a cheetah at rest, still sated. The moment she began to feel the pangs of hunger, however, she would pounce on the prey she had already singled out long before. And that prey was him, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a trembling, clumsy little domestic animal who would never manage to outrun those extremely long, springy legs that for the moment were deceptively crossed. And, most troubling of all, once those fangs sank into his flesh and that tongue began to savor him, he would quickly prove bland to the cheetah’s tastes and disappointing to the schoolteacher husband in the story the cheetah was certain to tell him. His only hope was to play the fool to avoid going to war, and pretend not to have understood. “I came today for two reasons.”
“You could have come anyway, for no reason at all.” The beast had her eye on him, and there was no distracting her.
“You told me that, aside from the car, Angelo had given you jewelry.”
“Yes. Would you like to see it?”
“No, I’m not interested in seeing it. I’m more interested in the boxes the jewels came in. Do you still have them?” “Yes, I’ll go get them.”
She stood, picked up the tray, and took it away. She returned at once and handed the inspector two black boxes, already open and empty. They were lined with white silk and each bore the same inscription: A . D IMORA J EWELRY-M ONTELUSA.
This was what he wanted to know and what his dream had suggested to him. He gave the boxes back to Elena, who set them down on the coffee table.
“And what was the other reason?” the woman asked.
“That’s harder to say. The autopsy revealed an important detail. Two threads of fabric were found stuck between the victim’s teeth. The crime lab informed me that it is a special fabric used almost exclusively in the manufacture of women’s panties.”
“What does it mean?” asked Elena.
“It means that someone, before shooting him, stuck a pair of panties in his mouth to keep him from screaming. Add to this the fact that the victim was found in a state suggesting he’d been about to engage in a sexual act. It being rather inconceivable that a man would go around with a pair of women’s panties in his pocket, that must mean the person who killed him was not a man but a woman.”
“I see,” said Elena. “A crime of passion, apparently.”