Game of Mirrors (9 page)

As might be expected, she had set the table on the veranda.

But there was a lot more light outside than the previous time, which was disturbing.

Liliana intercepted Montalbano’s glance at the wall sconce and explained.

“The bulb burned out and all I could find in the house was this hundred-watt bulb.”

So while we’re eating
, thought the inspector,
the mosquitoes will be eating us
.

They didn’t sit across from one another. Liliana had put out two chairs side by side.

“This way I can look out at the sea, too,” she said.

Not far from shore there was a boat with two fishermen on it. What on earth could they have been fishing for at this hour so close to the beach?

It was very hot outside.

The tête-à-tête got off to an unromantic start. As they were looking at each other and smiling, Montalbano suddenly slapped Liliana’s left shoulder, and she immediately followed with a quick cuff to the side of the inspector’s head.

The first two mosquitoes had fallen on the field of battle, but reinforcements by the thousands were on their way.

They were barely halfway through the antipasti and Liliana’s bare shoulders and arms were already covered with pink mosquito bites. They couldn’t go on this way.

“Listen,” said Montalbano, “I think all the mosquitoes in the province are gathering here. The light is too bright. I should go and get another light bulb from my house, or else replace this one with something from your dining room.”

“Just turn it off,” Liliana said with irritation.

Montalbano obeyed. As a result, they were plunged into total darkness, so that they barely knew where their mouths were anymore. The inspector felt like laughing.

How was Liliana going to remedy the situation, which was threatening to turn into a farce?

“The only solution is to move everything into the dining room,” she finally suggested, reluctantly.

Apparently the dining room was not the preferred battlefield for her war plans.

And so they started going back and forth, carrying bottles, dishes, glasses, silverware, tablecloth, and napkins.

On his last journey out to the veranda, Montalbano noticed that the two fishermen were pulling their boat ashore. Maybe they’d figured they wouldn’t catch any more fish that evening.

Inside the house, however, the heat was almost unbearable. They finished the antipasti with the help of some ice-cold white wine, which went down like a dream.

The wine gave Liliana the strength to make an attempt to end the stalemate.

“It pains me just to look at you,” she said at one point, smiling. “How can you stand it? Take off your jacket and unbutton your shirt, or you’re going to melt like a ball of ice cream.”

It wasn’t true. The inspector would hardly have broken a sweat even at the equator, but he concurred.

“You’re right. Thanks,” he said.

He remained in shirtsleeves with his collar unbuttoned. And what was she going to do now? Start some sort of game of strip poker?

Since she wasn’t doing anything, he decided to provoke her.

“And what about you?”

“I can still hold out as I am.”

She was saving her secret moves for later, when the atmosphere would be more conducive.

She got up from the table and brought back a platter of pasta in salmon sauce.

Montalbano’s heart gave a flutter. If the pasta was overcooked, he would be unable to swallow it. Instead, to his relief, he immediately found that, while not superb, the pasta was at least edible.

And it helped them to polish off a second bottle of wine.

Eating the pasta hadn’t been easy, however, since every so often, as he was bringing a forkful to his mouth, Liliana would suddenly grab his hand, bring it to her lips, and kiss the back of it.

When they were done, Montalbano helped her bring the empty plates and silverware into the kitchen.

For the second course, she’d prepared two slices of beef in a hot sauce that he’d never tasted before.

The spicy sauce called for more wine. Montalbano couldn’t tell whether Liliana was beginning to feel its effects or was just pretending.

First came the giggles.

“Your moustache. . . . heeheehee! . . . Look at this little crumb . . . heeheehee!”

Then she dropped her fork and the inspector bent down to pick it up.

As he was crouching, she put her naked foot on his back, between the shoulder blades.

“I dub thee knight of my . . .”

Montalbano never found out what sort of honor she was bestowing on him because she started to fall out of her chair and didn’t finish her sentence.

But she pulled herself quickly back up, announcing that she couldn’t stand the heat any longer and had to change her clothes because her sweat-dampened little dress was bothering her.

“I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said, heading for the bedroom door.

But after taking three steps, she turned around, approached Montalbano, who in the meantime had stood up out of politeness, wrapped her arms around his waist, put her mouth on his, and pressed it there, opening her lips ever so slowly.

The kiss was a long one.

To say that Montalbano went along with it only out of his sense of duty as a policeman would have been stretching things.

In fact, his body started to act the way the Garibaldini were said to have acted when they sprang to the attack before the general had ever given the order.

His hands, for example, independently of his will, descended as far as the young woman’s posterior globes.

She then took him by the hand and, staggering slightly, led him into the bedroom.

She turned on the light. The window was open.

In a flash she’d taken off her little dress. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and had on a purely hypothetical pair of panties.

She lay down on the bed and opened her arms toward Montalbano, smiling.

At this point Montalbano realized he was utterly lost.

His right foot made one step towards the bed, despite the fact that his brain was ordering him with all its authority to stay put and not move.

The left foot followed its colleague with equal enthusiasm.

Only divine intervention could save him now from the abyss into which he was about to plummet.

“Come on! What are you waiting for?”

The immediate effect of her voice was to induce the inspector to leap forward, in that both his feet responded simultaneously to the invitation.

Probably only Saint Anthony could have resisted.

And Saint Anthony, heeding the call, promptly intervened.

Montalbano’s cell phone, which he’d transferred from his jacket to his trouser pocket, started to ring.

The return to reality was so violent that the inspector gave a sort of cry of pain.

It was Fazio.

“We caught ’em and are bringing ’em in to the
station,” he said. “Now you can pick up where you left off, if you want.”

Was there a note of sarcasm in his last statement?

“No, I’ll be right over,” said Montalbano.

Then, turning to Liliana: “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

“Are you crazy? Do you really mean that?”

Liliana had sat up and was glaring at him so intensely that if he’d kept still for another second he would have caught fire.

He didn’t answer, but merely ran and grabbed his jacket, jumped down from the veranda, bounded across the beach to his house, got in the car, started it up, and drove off.

It took him little more than a quarter of the time it usually took him to go from his house to the station, but he wasn’t sure whether he was driving so fast because he wanted to escape Liliana or because he was so anxious to interrogate the two suspects.

While waiting for him, Fazio paced back and forth in the station parking lot, which was practically deserted.

The inspector gave him a questioning look.

“It’s too hot inside,” Fazio explained.

“So where are they?”

“We put them in a holding cell. I sent Gallo home to bed.”

“You did the right thing. Did they give you any trouble?”

“The usual sort of stuff.”

“Where’d you nab them?”

“Right outside the bedroom window. They’d climbed over the gate.”

Montalbano marveled.

“Right outside the window? How come I didn’t hear anything?”

Fazio answered a bit awkwardly.

“Well, we made some noise, Chief, but you were . . . I think your thoughts were elsewhere at that moment.”

Good thing there wasn’t much light in the parking lot, or Fazio would have noticed that the inspector was blushing.

They went inside, to Montalbano’s office. Right in the middle of his desk, in full view, was a brand new video camera.

“They filmed you with this,” said Fazio. “If you want to see yourself . . . it’s got a built-in monitor.”

Montalbano’s blood froze. Did he really have to see himself playing the star of a tacky porno flick?
The Inspector and the Deep-Throat Femme Fatale
 . . .
Wet Investigations
 . . . He felt too out of breath to say yes.

So he just nodded assent, as his legs were giving out from under him, and he collapsed in a chair.

Fazio, pretending not to notice his discomfort, came up to him and set the video cam down in front of him.

“You ready?”

“Y . . . es.”

Fazio pushed a button.

The filming started at the moment Liliana turned on the bedroom light.

As soon as she took off her dress and lay down in bed, the motherfucking sonofabitch of a cameraman zoomed in on the inspector’s face.

Oscar for Best Actor.

His expression was a cross between that of a starving dog being shown a piece of meat and that of chaste Joseph trying to escape the clutches of Potiphar’s wife.

As his eyes were about to pop out of their sockets, his lips moved like those of a small child about to start crying.

To say he looked ridiculous wouldn’t be saying enough. If these images had been broadcast, all of Vigàta would be laughing behind his back.

But he didn’t have to drink the bitter cup down to the dregs. The filming stopped just as he was taking his first step towards the bed like a robot starting up.

Matre santa
, how embarrassing!

Good thing they hadn’t filmed the kiss in the dining room!

“Have you . . .” he began.

The voice that came out of his mouth sounded bizarre, like that of a turkey-cock. He cleared his throat and started over.

“Have you identified them?”

“Yessir. The cameraman’s name is Marcello Savagnoli
and his assistant is Amedeo Borsellino. They both work full-time for TeleVigàta. You want me to bring them in here?”

Would he be able to control himself and not start punching them and kicking them in the balls?

Maybe, maybe not. Whatever the case, he could try.

“All right.”

Savagnoli—medium height, open shirt, gold crucifix in a thicket of chest hair, gold bracelet—had the face of a scoundrel, while Borsellino looked genuinely scared.

Before anyone said anything, the cameraman sat down and sneered at Montalbano.

“One at a time,” the inspector said to Fazio. “I’ll interrogate Borsellino afterwards.”

As Fazio was going out with the assistant, Montalbano stood up, went over to Savagnoli, and, smiling affably, said:

“Would you please stand up?”

As soon as the man was on his feet, he dealt him a swift kick in the balls. Savagnoli gasped for air and fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes, writhing and groaning.

“Not a peep!” Montalbano threatened.

Then he went and sat back down.

“What happened?” asked Fazio, coming in.

“Dunno,” the inspector said with a cherubic face. “He must have had a sudden bellyache. Sit him back down and give him a glass of water.”

When Savagnoli recovered, his attitude had entirely changed. He kept his eyes lowered, was sweating, and no longer looked like a scoundrel.

“How did you catch them without their noticing?” the inspector asked Fazio.

They’d already prearranged part of the answer to the question before he went to Liliana’s. But he wanted Savagnoli to hear it.

“We were just conducting our routine evening patrol,” Fazio began, “when we saw two individuals scale the gate to a house in Marinella, enter the yard, and position themselves outside an open window. We waited and watched, out of view, to see what they were doing. And we finally intervened when we saw that they were secretly filming what was going on inside that room.”

The inspector looked over at Savagnoli.

“That should be enough to charge them with a crime, I should think,” he said. “Don’t you agree? Violation of property, violation of privacy, intent to blackmail . . .”

“I was only following the orders of my employer, Mr. Ragonese,” the cameraman replied.

“And what orders were those?”

“He said there was a big scoop in the making. He’d received an anonymous phone call.”

“At what time did you arrive at the scene?”

“A little before you did. We noticed there was a lot of light outside on the veranda . . .”

“You didn’t know this beforehand?”

“How could we have known?”

“Go on.”

“We saw a boat beached nearby, so we put it out in the water and pretended we were fishermen. We were hoping things would heat up quickly. But after a while you and the lady went into the dining room. There was no way we could film you in there. And so we forgot about the boat, went around the house, climbed over the gate, and waited in the dark outside the bedroom window in the hope that sooner or later . . .”

Between the heat and the things the guy was saying, Montalbano couldn’t stand it any longer. He felt like he was going to throw up and didn’t want to hear anything else.

He sprang to his feet. Everyone looked at him.

“Tell Mr. Ragonese that, if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll be here at the station tomorrow morning at nine,” he said to Savagnoli.

Then to Fazio:

“Confiscate the video cam, write up a report, then release these assholes. I’m going home.”

There were two points in Liliana’s favor, Montalbano reflected on his way home.

She had not put in the hundred-watt bulb to facilitate the filming. And she had made no prior arrangement with the cameramen.

So was she part of it or wasn’t she? And, if so, to what degree?

Or was she totally innocent of the trap that had been set for him, which luckily hadn’t worked out?

In other words, did the person who made the phone call to Ragonese want to entrap just him, or Liliana as well?

Driving past the Lombardos’ house, he noticed that it was all dark. Liliana must have gone to bed, mad as hell at him.

He sat outside for a while, waiting for his agitation to pass. He’d dodged a bullet, thanks to Nicolò. Ragonese would probably have aired the scoop ad infinitum.

But, when you came right down to it, would it really have been such a scoop? There certainly wasn’t anything illegal about his actions, though he, much more than Liliana, would have been publicly disgraced. The commissioner would surely have had him transferred. And perhaps, in the final analysis, that was the real purpose of the scoop. He went to bed, but tossed and turned a great deal before finally managing to fall asleep. The heat was the main reason, of course, but every so often the image of Liliana with her arms open threw gasoline on the fire.

The following morning, Liliana was not waiting outside the gate at eight. There was no sign of life inside the house. She must have taken the city bus to work. It had to
have been the first time she’d been rejected by a man. He probably wouldn’t be seeing her again, except perhaps by chance—unless her unexplained need to have him as a friend somehow proved stronger than her resentment over being slighted.

Indeed, things had not gone the way he’d wanted them to go the previous night, and he’d failed in his intent to discover Liliana’s reasons for acting out this whole song and dance with him.

At nine on the dot, he got a call from Catarella.

“Chief, ’at’d be ’at ’ere’s a Signor Fragolesi onna premisses sez ’e got a pointment wit’ yiz . . .” (It must have been Ragonese) “ . . . anna lawyer called Calalasso ’oo’d be ’ere wit ’im, ’im bein’ a foremintioned Signor Fragolesi.”

“Show them in and get me Fazio, too.”

The lawyer’s name was Calasso. Montalbano knew and respected him. He didn’t hold out his hand for Ragonese to shake, and the newsman responded in kind. The two men were sitting down as Fazio appeared with some papers in his hand. The reports from the night before.