The Age of Doubt (7 page)

He’d already stood up when the phone rang. To answer or not to answer? That was the question. Prudence suggested that it was best not to answer, but since he had given Laura this very number, he thought it might be her saying she had changed her mind, and so he picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Ah, Inspector Montalbano, what luck to find you in your office! Did you just get back?”

“This very moment.”

It was that humongous pain in the ass Dr. Lattes, called
Lattes e mieles
, chief of the commissioner’s cabinet, who, among other things, was convinced that Montalbano was married with children.

“Well, my friend, the commissioner has gone and left me with the task of contacting you.”

“What can I do for you, Doctor?”

“We urgently need to do a complete review of documents lost during that sort of flood that damaged your offices the other day.”

“I see.”

“Would you have an hour or so, or perhaps an hour and a half, to devote to this?”

“When?”

“Right now. It’s something we could even do over the phone. You need only have a list of the lost documents at hand. Let’s start by doing a summary check, which will later serve as . . .”

Montalbano felt lost. He would have to cancel the dinner engagement with Laura!

No, he would not submit to this revenge of the bureaucracy.

But how? How would he ever wriggle out of this?

Perhaps only a good improvised performance could save him. He would do the tragic-actor thing, and he got off to a flying start.

“No! No! Alas! Woe is me! I don’t have the time!” he said in a despairing voice.

It made an immediate impression on Lattes.

“Good God, Inspector! What’s wrong?”

“I just now got a call from my wife!”

“And?”

“She phoned me from the hospital, alas!”

“But what happened?”

“It’s my youngest, little Gianfrancesco. He’s very sick and I must immediately—”

Dr. Lattes didn’t hesitate for a second.

“For heaven’s sake, Montalbano! Go, and hurry! I shall pray to the Blessed Virgin for your little . . . What did you say his name was?”

Montalbano couldn’t remember. He blurted out the first name that came to mind.

“Gianantonio.”

“But didn’t you say Gianfrancesco?”

“You see? I can’t even think straight! Gianantonio is the oldest, and he’s fine, thank God!”

“Go! Go! Don’t waste any more time! And good luck! And tomorrow I want a full report, don’t forget.”

Montalbano was off like a rocket to Montereale.

But after barely a mile and a half, the car stalled. There wasn’t a drop of gasoline left in the tank. Fortunately there was a filling station a couple of hundred yards up the road.

He got out of the car, grabbed a jerry can from the trunk, ran to the gas station, filled up the can, paid, ran back to the car, poured in the gas, started up the car, stopped at the station again, filled up the tank, and drove off—cursing the saints all the while.

When he got to the restaurant, all sweaty and out of breath, Laura was already sitting at a table, nervously waiting for him.

“Five minutes more and I would have left,” she said, cold as a slab of ice.

Owing perhaps to the ordeal he had gone through to get there more or less on time, her words had the immediate effect of seriously pissing him off. He was unable to control himself, and out of his mouth came a declaration he would never have thought himself capable of.

“Well, then I’ll just leave myself.”

And he turned his back, went out of the restaurant, got in his car, and drove home to Marinella.

He wanted nothing more than to get into the shower and stay there for as long as it took to wash away his agitation.

Twenty minutes later, as he was drying himself off, he thought again with a cooler head about what he had done, and realized he’d committed an act of colossal stupidity. Because he absolutely needed Laura’s help if he was going to get anywhere in the investigation. Indeed, the only way Mimì Augello could come into contact with La Giovannini was through Laura.

That was what happened when you mixed personal matters with work.

He decided he would call her first thing in the morning and apologize.

He no longer felt hungry. Perhaps his appetite would return if he went out for a few minutes onto the veranda and breathed some sea air. He had noticed, on the way back from the restaurant, that it was less chilly than the previous evening and there wasn’t a breath of wind. So he went outside with only his underpants on. He flicked on the light for the veranda from the inside, grabbed his cigarettes, and opened the French door. And froze. Not because it was cold outside, but because there was Laura, standing before him, speechless, eyes lowered.

Apparently she had knocked on the door when he was in the shower and he hadn’t heard it, and so, knowing he must be at home, she had walked around the house to enter from the side facing the beach.

“Forgive me,” she said.

And she looked up. At once her grave expression vanished and she started laughing.

At that very same moment, as if seeing his reflection in her eyes, Montalbano realized he was in his underpants.

“Ahhh!” he screamed.

And he dashed back to the bathroom as if in a silent film.

He was so upset, so confused, that the comedy continued when, as he was standing and putting his trousers on, he slipped on the wet tiles and fell on his ass to the floor.

When at last he was able to think straight again, he emerged and went out to the veranda.

Laura was sitting on the bench, smoking a cigarette.

“I guess we’ve just had a quarrel,” she said.

“Yeah. I apologize, but, you see . . .”

“Let’s stop apologizing to each other. I owe you an explanation.”

“No you don’t.”

“Well, I’m going to explain anyway, because I think it’s necessary. Have you got any more of that wine?”

“Of course.”

He got up and went out, then came back with a new bottle and two glasses. Laura guzzled a whole glass before speaking.

“I had no intention of calling you today and had promised myself that, if you called me, I would say I wasn’t up to seeing you.”

“Why?”

“Let me finish.”

But Montalbano insisted.

“Look, Laura, if there was anything I said or did yesterday that may have offended you, for whatever reason—”

“But I wasn’t offended at all. On the contrary.”

On the contrary? What did she mean? He’d best sit tight and hear what she had to say.

“I didn’t want to see you because I was afraid I’d seem ridiculous. And anyway, it wouldn’t have been right.”

Montalbano felt dazed.

And he feared that anything he might say would be the wrong thing. He didn’t understand what was happening.

“And so I told myself that it would be a mistake for us to keep seeing each other. It’s the first time in my life this sort of thing has happened to me. It’s humiliating and demoralizing. I’m completely helpless and can’t do anything about it. My will counts for nothing. And in fact, when you called me, I didn’t know . . . Help me.”

She stopped, poured herself another glass, and drank half of it. As she brought it to her lips, Montalbano saw her eyes glisten, brimming with tears.

7

Help me, she’d said. But with what? And why was she crying? How could he help her if he didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening to her?

Then, all at once, Montalbano understood. And, at first, he refused to believe what he thought he’d understood.

Was it possible the same thing was happening to her as was happening to him?

Was it possible the proverbial
coup de foudre
had struck them both?

He felt angry at himself for thinking of a cliché (even if it was French), but nothing more original came to mind.

And he began to feel weak in the knees, torn in opposite directions, happy and scared at once.

Why don’t
you
help
me? he thought of asking her.

But as he was asking for help without saying anything, he wished he could embrace her and hold her tight.

And to keep from doing this, he had to make such an effort that a few droplets of sweat formed on his brow.

Then he did the only thing that could be done, if he was really the man he thought he was, even though it cost him great physical pain, a sort of knife blade piercing his chest.

“Well, given the fact that we’ve met,” he said indifferently, as if not having understood a word she’d said or grasped the suffering in those words, “let me take advantage of the fact and ask a favor of you, assuming you’re able to do it for me.”

“Go ahead.”

She seemed disappointed and pleased at the same time.

“My second-in-command on the force is a man named Mimì Augello, who’s not only an excellent policeman but a very good-looking guy who has a way with women.”

“And?” asked Laura, somewhat taken aback by that preamble.

“I thought it could be very useful to have him meet the owner of the yacht.”

“I see. You think that if they hit it off, your man might manage to get some information out of her?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you mind telling me why you’re so fixated on this yacht? You should know, at any rate, that the boat has undergone many Customs inspections and they’ve never found anything abnormal.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t really explain, not any better than that. It’s just, well, a feeling, an impression . . .”

Damn! He was supposed to make like the hunting dog on the scent of its prey, not tell her the whole story of Vanna!

“And these impressions of yours, are they always correct?” she asked with a hint of irony.

“So for you she’s just a rich widow whose only form of amusement is to sail the seas, ending up, from time to time, in the captain’s bed?”

“Why not? What’s so strange about that?”

“All right then. We’ll just leave it at that.”

“Wait a second. Just because I have a different opinion from yours doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you. Tell me how I can be of use to you.”

“You have to arrange things so that Augello can meet Signora Giovannini.”

She remained silent for a spell.

“If you don’t feel like it . . . ,” Montalbano began.

“No, I do, I do. But, before we go any further, are you sure the people on the yacht won’t know who he is?”

“Absolutely certain.”

“So the question is how to get them to meet. It won’t be easy, you know. I’ll have to bring him with me aboard the yacht; but first I have to find a good excuse for boarding the ship myself.”

“I was thinking you could introduce him as some sort of specialist who needed to go aboard to check something.”

Laura started laughing.

“Well, you can’t get any clearer than that!”

“Sorry, but I don’t—”

“Let me think for a minute. I’ll come up with something, I’m sure of it.”

And she reached out to drink more wine. Montalbano stopped her.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit much, on an empty stomach? Would you like to eat something?”

“Yes,” she said. Then, suddenly, “No. I’m going to leave.”

She stood up.

“No, come on,” said Montalbano.

She sat back down. Then stood up again.

“I’m leaving.”

“Please!”

She sat back down.

She was like a puppet controlled by invisible strings.

Montalbano went into the kitchen and opened the oven. Inside a casserole were four large mullets cooked in a special sauce of Adelina’s own invention.

He lit the oven and turned it on high, so the fish would warm up fast.

Then he opened the refrigerator, stuck in another bottle of wine, and pulled out a plateful of olives, cheese, and salted sardines. From a drawer he extracted a tablecloth, napkins, and cutlery and set these all on the kitchen table, to be taken outside momentarily onto the veranda, where he would set the table.

At this point, wanting to make sure the mullet weren’t burning, he opened the oven and grabbed the pan, and as he was still bent over he felt the weight of Laura’s body press against his back as she silently embraced him, joining her hands over his chest.

He froze in that position, half bent over, feeling the blood begin to course ever faster in his body and fearing that his pounding heartbeat could be heard in the room, loud as a jackhammer.

He didn’t even notice that the scalding-hot handles on the casserole were burning his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” Laura said softly.

And immediately she detached her body from his, unfolding her hands very slowly, letting them slide away as in a long caress.

He heard her walk out of the kitchen.

Stunned, flummoxed, and numb, Montalbano set the casserole down on the table, turned on the faucet to let the cold water run over his scorched fingers, then grabbed the tablecloth and silverware and went to set the table outside.

But he stopped in the kitchen doorway.

He had only five or six more steps to take to reach the veranda and perhaps find happiness there.

But he felt scared. Those few yards were more daunting than a transatlantic crossing. They would take him very far from the life he had lived up to that moment and would certainly transform his existence completely. Could he handle that, at his age?

No, there was no time for questions. To hell with doubt, conscience, reason.

He closed his eyes, the way people do before jumping off a cliff, and resumed walking.

On the veranda there was no sign of Laura.

At that moment he heard the sound, very near, of a car driving off.

Laura had left the same way she had come.

And so he collapsed on the stone bench.

The lump in his throat almost prevented him from breathing.

He finally managed to doze off at around four o’clock in the morning. From the moment he’d gone to bed he’d done nothing but toss and turn, repeatedly getting up and lying back down. The Sicilian dictum said that of all things, the bed is best—if you can’t sleep you still can rest. But that night he’d found neither sleep nor rest, only discomfort, heartache alternating with melancholy and self-pity. “Let go of it, and it’s lost,” went another proverb. In his case, it was lost forever. He remembered a poem by
Umberto Saba. Normally poetry helped him get through his worst moments. In this case, however, it merely twisted the knife in the wound. The poet compared himself to a dog chasing a butterfly’s shadow, and like the dog, he had to content himself with the shadow of a girl he was in love with. Because he knew,
disconsolate sadness / that such was the way / of wisdom
. But was it right, was it honest, to be wise in the face of love’s richness?

An hour after he had managed to fall asleep, his eyes were wide open again. As he woke up, for a second he was convinced that he had dreamt the scene between Laura and himself in front of the oven, but then the pain of his burnt fingers reminded him that it was all real.

Laura had been wiser than him.

Wiser or more frightened?

But running away from reality didn’t negate reality. It left it whole—indeed more solid than ever, because now they were both fully conscious of it.

How, when they met in front of others, would they manage to hide what they felt?

Should he take every measure to avoid seeing her? He could do this, but it would mean abandoning the investigation. That was too high a price. He didn’t feel like paying it.

It was about nine in the morning, and Montalbano had already been in his office for half an hour or so when the telephone rang.

He was in a dark mood and didn’t feel like doing anything. He was staring at the damp stains on the ceiling, trying to make out faces and animal shapes, but that morning his imagination had abandoned him, and the stains remained stains.

“Ahh Chief! Iss a man says ’is name’s Fiorentino.”

How was it that Catarella had finally got someone’s name right?

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“Yessir. ’E wants a talk t’yiz poissonally in poisson.”

“Put him through.”

“I can’t put ’im true in so how as ’e’s on—”

“The premises?”

“Yessir.”

“Show him in.”

Five minutes went by and nobody appeared. He called Catarella.

“Well? Where’s this Fiorentino?”

“I showed ’im in.”

“But he’s not here!”

“He coun’t be there, Chief, in so much as, juss like you said, I showed ’im into the waitin’ room.”

“Bring him to me!”

“Straitaways, Chief.”

A short little man of about fifty, well dressed and wearing glasses, came in.

“Please sit down, Signor Fiorentino.”

The man gave him a confused look.

“I beg your pardon, but my name is Toscano.”

Catarella’s mangling of people’s surnames was getting more and more sophisticated.

“I’m sorry. Please sit down and tell me what I can do for you.”

“I’m the owner of the Bellavista Hotel.”

Montalbano knew the place. It had been recently built just outside of town, on the Montereale road.

“A few days ago a guest arrived, saying he was going to stay for a day and a night. He went up to his room, then came back down to the lobby, had us call a cab for him, and then left, and we haven’t seen him since.”

“Was it you who registered him?”

“No, I drop by the hotel only once a day. My primary business is furniture. Late last night, as I was going to bed, I got a call from the night porter, who had just seen the appeal from the Free Channel for information about an unknown man who had been found dead. In his opinion, the description they gave fit our missing client, so I decided to come and tell you.”

“Thank you very much, Signor Toscano. So presumably all the information on this man is at the hotel desk?”

“Of course.”

“Would you like to go there with me?”

“I’m at your service. I told the night porter to wait at the desk for that very purpose.”

The document the guest had left with the porter and never picked up was not, however, much help at all. It was a European Union passport issued by the French Republic two years earlier, and it said that its bearer was Émile Lannec, born in Rouen on September 3, 1965. The tiny photograph showed the nondescript face of a sandy-haired man of about forty with broad shoulders. Montalbano felt as if he’d heard that name before. But when? On what occasion? He tried hard to remember, but couldn’t come up with anything.