Must be my convalescence, he told himself.
He would sit down in the armchair, pick up a newspaper or magazine, and halfway through an article just a little longer than the rest, he would get fed up, his eyes would start to droop, and he would sink into a sweaty sleep.
Sargint Fasio said you was comin' home today. I am hapy and releved. The sargint also said for me to feed you lite foods.
Adelina
The housekeeper's note was on the kitchen table. Montalbano rushed to the fridge to see exactly what she meant by lite. There were two fresh hakes to be served with oil and lemon. He unplugged the phone; he wanted to reaccustom himself at an easy pace to living at home. There was a lot of mail, but he didn't open a single letter or read a single postcard. He ate and went to bed.
Before falling asleep, he asked himself a question: If the doctors reassured him that he would recover all his strength, why did he have that lump of sadness in his throat?
For the first ten minutes he drove apprehensively, paying closer attention to the reactions of his side than to the road. Then, seeing that he was weathering the bumps without difficulty, he accelerated, passed through Vig, took the road to Montelusa, turned left at the Montaperto crossroads, drove another few miles, turned onto an unpaved trail, and pulled up at a small clearing in front of a farmhouse. He got out of the car. Mariannina, Gege's sister, who had been his teacher at school, was sitting in a wicker chair beside the front door, fixing a basket. The moment she saw the inspector, she ran up to meet him.
"Salvo, I knew you'd come."
"You're the first person I'm visiting since leaving the hospital," said Montalbano, embracing her.
Mariannina began weeping very softly, without a sound, only tears, and Montalbanos eyes welled up.
"Pull up a chair," said Mariannina.
Montalbano sat down beside her. She took his hand and began to stroke it.
"Did he suffer?"
"No. I realized while they were still shooting that they'd snuffed out Gege on the spot. This was later confirmed. I don't even think he ever realized what was happening."
"Is it true you killed the one who killed Gege?"
"Yeah."
"Gege will be happy, wherever he is."
Mariannina sighed and squeezed the inspector's hand a little harder.
"Gege loved you with all his soul."
Meu amigo de alma, the title of a book, came to Montalbano's mind.
"I loved him, too," he said.
"Do you remember how naughty he was?"
And a naughty boy he was, mischievous, bad. Clearly Mariannina was not referring to recent years, when Gege had his run-ins with the law, but to a distant time when her younger brother was a restless little scamp. Montalbano smiled.
"Do you remember the time he threw a firecracker into a copper cauldron that someone was repairing, and the blast made the poor guy faint?"
"And the time he emptied his inkwell into Mrs. Longo's purse?"
They talked about Gege and his exploits for nearly two hours, recounting episodes that never went beyond his adolescence.
"It's getting late," said Montalbano. "I should go."
"I'd like to tell you to stay for dinner, but what I made is probably too heavy for you."
"What did you make?"
"Attuppateddri in tomato sauce."
Attuppateddri were small light-brown snails which, when they went into hibernation, would secrete a fluid that solidified into a white sheet, which served to close attuppari in Sicilian the entrance to the shell. Montalbano's first impulse was to decline in disgust. How long would this obsession continue to torment him? In the end, he coolly decided to accept, as a twofold challenge to his stomach and his psyche. With the plate in front of him giving off an exquisite, ochre-colored scent, he had to steel himself, but after extracting the first attuppateddri with a pin and tasting it, he suddenly felt liberated: with the obsession gone and the melancholy banished, there was no doubt the belly, too, would adjust.
...
At headquarters he was smothered by embraces. Tortorella even wiped away a tear.
"I know what it means to come back after being shot!" said the officer.
"Where's Augello?"
"In his office, your office," said Catarella.
He opened the door without knocking and Mim leapt out of the chair behind the desk as if he'd been caught stealing. He blushed.
"I haven't touched anything. It's just that from here, the phone calls"
"Mim, you did absolutely the right thing," Montalbano cut him short, repressing the urge to kick him in the ass for having dared to sit in his place.
"I was planning to come to your house today", said Augello.
"To do what?"
"To arrange protection."
Protection? For whom?
"For whom?"
"For you, of course. There's no saying they won't try again, after coming up empty the first time."
"You're wrong. Nothing more's going to happen to me. Because, you see, Mim, it was you who had me shot."
Augello turned so red, he looked as though someone had inserted a high-voltage plug up his bum. He started trembling. Then all his blood disappeared God-knows-where, leaving him pale as a corpse.
"Where do you get these ideas?" he managed to mutter awkwardly.
Montalbano reckoned he'd sufficiently avenged himself for the expropriation of his desk.
"Calm down, Mim. That's not what I meant to say. What I meant was: it was you who set the mechanism in motion that led to my shooting."
"Explain yourself," said Augello, collapsing into the chair and dabbing all around his mouth and forehead with his handkerchief.
"You, my good friend, without consulting me, without asking if I agreed or not, put two officers on Ingrassia's tail. Did you really think he was so stupid he wouldn't notice? It took him maybe half a day to find out he was being shadowed. And he understandably thought it was me who gave the order. He knew he'd fucked up a couple of times and that I had him in my sights, and so, to brush up his image for Brancato, who was planning to get rid of him, it was you who related their phone conversation to me, he hired two assholes to eliminate me. Except that his scheme turned into a fiasco. By this time Brancato, or somebody else, got fed up with Ingrassia and his brilliant ideas don't forget the pointless little murder of poor Cavaliere Misuraca and so they took matters in hand and made him vanish from the face of the earth. If you hadn't put Ingrassia on his guard, Gege would still be alive and I wouldn't have this pain in my side. And there you have it."
"If that's how things went ...I guess you're right," said Mim annihilated.
"That's how things went, you can bet your ass on it."
...
The plane pulled up very near to the gate, so the passengers didn't need to be shuttled by bus to the terminal. Montalbano saw Livia descend the ramp and walk towards the entrance with her head down. Hiding in the crowd, he watched Livia as she waited interminably for her baggage, collected it, loaded it onto a cart, and then headed towards the taxi stand. They had agreed the night before that she would take the train from Palermo to Montelusa and that he would limit himself to picking her up at the station. At the last minute, however, he had decided to surprise her and show up at Punta Ri airport.
"Are you alone? Need a lift?"
Livia, who was making her way towards the first cab in line, stopped in her tracks and shouted.
"Salvo!"
They embraced happily.
"But you look fantastic!" she commented.
"So do you," said Montalbano. "I've been watching you for over half an hour, ever since you got off the plane."
"Why didn't you say something sooner?"
"I like seeing how you exist without me."
They got in the car and immediately Montalbano, instead of starting the ignition, hugged and kissed her, put a hand on her breast and lowered his head, caressing her knees and stomach with his cheek.