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 <strong>[9]</strong>. 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.
The passport’s only peculiarity lay in the fact that there wasn’t a single page that wasn’t covered with stamps and entry and exit visas for various Middle Eastern and African nations. The man had certainly traveled a lot in two years! He whirled about more than a spinning top!
Émile Lannec. The inspector couldn’t get the name out of his head. Then, all at once, he associated it with the sea. Lannec had something to do with the sea.
Want to bet he’d met him the time Livia had wanted to go to Saint-Tropez and he kept wanting to shoot himself in the head for living inside a cliché?
“I’m going to take this with me,” he said, putting the passport in his pocket.
Gaetano Scimè, the sharp, fortyish night porter, was, on the other hand, a tremendous help.
“Was it you who signed the guest in?”
“Yessir.”
“What shift do you work?”
“From ten at night to seven in the morning.”
“And at what time did this gentleman arrive?”
“It must have been around nine-thirty in the morning.”
“Why were you still on the job?”
Scimè threw his hands up.
“By chance. That day my coworker, who’s also a friend, had to take his wife to the hospital and asked me to fill in for him until noon. Every so often we do these kinds of favors for each other.”
“What did this man look like?”
“Just like they said on TV. I got a good long look at him when he came down to-”
“Let’s proceed in orderly fashion, please. How did he seem the first time you saw him?”
The porter gave him a bewildered look.
“What do you mean?”
“Was he nervous, worried…?”
“He seemed perfectly normal to me.”
“How did he get here?”
“By cab, I think.”
“What do you mean by ‘I think’?”
“I mean that from here you can’t see the drop-off area and so I wasn’t able to see the taxi. But when the man came in, he still had his wallet in his hands, as if he had just paid his fare, and right after that, I heard a car leaving.”
“Where do you think he was coming from?”
The porter didn’t hesitate.
“From Punta Raisi, the airport.”
And he anticipated the inspector’s next question.
“The morning flight from Rome lands in Palermo at seven. And, in fact, three customers from Rome arrived about half an hour after he did. Apparently the Frenchman left the airport a little before the others.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, the man was carrying only a sort of overnight bag, whereas the others had suitcases and therefore had to wait for them at the luggage belt.”
“Go on.”
“Anyway, the guy stayed in his room for about an hour, then came back down.”
“Did he make any phone calls?”
“Not through our switchboard, no.”
“But can one call from the rooms without passing through the switchboard?”
“Of course. But in that case, a charge for the call would show up on the client’s account, whereas there was no charge for that room.”
“Do you know if he had a cell phone?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Go on.”
“So the man came down and asked me to call him a cab. Since we’re a bit out of the way, the taxi took about twenty minutes to get here.”
“And what did he do during that time?”
“He sat down and started thumbing through a magazine. He was…”
The porter paused.
“No, never mind,” he said. “Excuse me.”
“No, you’re not excused. Finish your sentence.”
“When the guy came downstairs, he seemed to be in a different mood.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, I dunno… More cheerful. He was humming.”
“As if he’d received some good news?”
“Something like that.”
“You should be a policeman.”
“Thanks.”
“Did he speak Italian?”
“He managed. Then the cab arrived and he left.”
“And since then you haven’t heard from him at any time.”
“No, he hasn’t called.”
“Had he reserved his room in advance?”
“No.”
“How do you think he knew about this hotel?”
“We advertise a lot,” the manager interjected. “Even abroad.”
“And have there been any phone calls for this man during this time?”
“None.”
“Do you think he’s ever been a guest before at this hotel?”
“I’d never seen him before.”
“Do you know the cab driver who came to pick him up?”
“Of course! Pippino Madonia, co-op number 14.”
“Where’s the man’s overnight bag?”
“Still in his room,” said the manager.
“Let me have the key.”
“Would you like me to come with you?” the manager asked.
“No, thanks.”
Émile Lannec and the sea.
The room, which was on the fourth floor, was in perfect order. The bathroom, too. It had a small balcony from which you could see the sea and, to the left, half of the port. It was so clean, in fact, that it seemed as if no one had ever stayed in it. The little suitcase, which was slightly bigger than an overnight bag, sat unopened atop the baggage stand. Montalbano opened it.
Inside were a shirt, a pair of underpants, and a pair of clean socks. In another compartment were the dirty garments the man had taken off.
What Montalbano hadn’t expected to find in it was a large pair of binoculars. He picked them up, looked at them carefully, then went out onto the balcony, pointed the binoculars at a rowboat that was barely larger than a dot, then zoomed in.
They had extraordinary powers of magnification. The little dot immediately turned into the face of one of the fishermen on the little boat.
The inspector then pointed the lenses towards the port.
At first he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Then he realized he was looking at the deck of the Vanna-more specifically, the door that led below decks, to the mess room.
He went back inside and emptied the little suitcase onto the bed. There wasn’t a single piece of paper, document, ticket-nothing whatsoever. He put the binoculars back inside, closed it, grabbed the bag, went down to the lobby, and turned it over to the manager.
“Keep this in your depository.”
<a l:href="#_ftnref9">[9]</a> From the poem “Favoletta” in Cuor Morituro (1925-1930), translation from Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Riverdale-on-Hudson: Sheep Meadow Press, 1998), p. 131.