Excursion to Tindari

dressed bite, the brain would preactivate the senses of taste and smell so that one seemed to eat the fish twice.

By the time he got up from the table, it was nine-thirty. He decided to take a stroll to the port. The truth of the matter was that he had no desire to see what he was expecting to see in Via Cavour. Some large trucks were being loaded onto the mail boat for Sampedusa. Few passengers, no tourists. It wasn’t the season yet. He dawdled for an hour or so, then made up his mind.

Entering Nene Sanfilippo’s apartment, he made sure the windows were well shuttered and let no light filter out, then went into the kitchen. Sanfilippo had, among other things, the essentials for making coffee, and Montalbano used the largest pot he could find, a four-cupper. As the coffee was boiling, he had a look around the apartment. Beside the computer, the one Catarella had worked on, was a shelf full of diskettes, CD-ROMS, CDs, and videocassettes. Catarella had put the computer disks in order and had stuck in a little piece of paper on which he’d written in block letters: DIRTY DISQUETTES. Porno stuff, therefore. Montalbano counted the videocassettes, thirty in all. Fifteen had been bought at a sex shop and had colorful labels and unambiguous titles; five had been recorded by Nene himself and each given a different woman’s name: Laura, Renee, Paola, Giulia, and Samantha. The other ten were commercial movie cassettes, all strictly American, and all with titles promising sex and violence. He took out the cassettes with the women’s names and brought them into the bedroom, where Nene Sanfilippo had an enormous television screen. The coffee was stale. He drank one cup, went back to the bedroom, took off his jacket and shoes, inserted the first cassette he came across, Samantha, stretched out on the bed, putting two pillows behind his head, and turned on the tape as he lit himself a cigarette.

The set consisted of a double bed, the same one that Montalbano was lying on. The shot was a fixed-frame. The camera still sat in position on the chest of drawers in front of him, ready for another erotic take that would never happen. Higher up, directly above the bureau, were two small floodlights, properly aimed, that would be turned on at the appointed time. The specialty of this Samantha, a redhead barely five foot one, tended towards the acrobatic. She moved about so much and assumed positions so complex that she often ended up off-camera. Nene Sanfilippo, in this sort of general review of the Kama Sutra, seemed perfectly at ease. The audio was terrible. The few words spoken could barely be heard. In compensation, the moans, grunts, sighs, and groans boomed forth at full volume, like television commercials. The entire viewing took forty-five minutes. Falling victim to a lethal boredom, the inspector put in the second cassette, Renee. It barely gave him time to notice that the set was exactly the same and that Renee was a girl of about twenty, very tall and very thin but with enormous tits, and in full possession of all her body hair. He didn’t feel like watching the whole tape, and the thought passed through his mind that he could use the fast-forward on the remote, stopping here and there to watch. It was only a fleeting thought, however, because no sooner did he see Nene begin to penetrate Renee doggy-style than an irresistible wave of lethargy hit him in the head like a crowbar, forcing him to shut his eyes and plunging him irremediably into a leaden sleep. His last thought was that there is no better soporific than pornography.

He woke up with a start, unable to understand whether he’d been roused by a screaming Renee in the throes of an earth-shaking orgasm or by the violent kicking at the front door as the doorbell rang without interruption. What was happening? Groggy with sleep, he got up, turned off the tape, and, heading towards the door to open up just as he was—disheveled, in shirtsleeves, trousers falling down (but when had he unfastened them to get more comfortable?), barefoot—he heard a voice he did not immediately recognize shout:

“Open up! Police!”

This completed his confusion. Wasn’t he the police?

He opened the door, to his horror. The first thing he saw was Mimi Augello in proper firing position (knees bent, ass slightly protruding, arms extended, both hands wrapped around the butt of the pistol), behind him the widow Concetta Lo Mascolo (nee Burgio), and behind her a throng of people crammed onto the landing and both staircases, above and below. At a single glance he recognized the entire Crucilla family (the father Stefano, retired, in a nightshirt, his wife in a terry cloth bathrobe, the daughter Samanta—this one without the h—in a provocative long sweater); Mr. Mistretta in underpants and Guinea-T with, inexplicably, his misshapen black tote bag in hand; and Pasqualino De Dominicis, the child arsonist, between his poppy in pajamas and his mommy Gina in a baby-doll nightie that was as gauzy as it was outdated.

At the sight of the inspector, two phenomena occurred: time stopped and everyone turned to stone. The widow Concetta Lo Mascolo (nee Burgio) took advantage of this to improvise a dramatic monologue that was part didactic, part explanatory.

“Madonna mia, Madonna mia, what a terrible fright! I’d just drifted off to sleep when all of sudden I thought I was hearing the same symphony I heard when the dear departed was alive! The slut going ah ah ah ah, with him making like a pig! Exactly like before! What! A ghost comes back to his house and brings his slut back with him? An’ he starts—excuse my language—he starts fucking like he’s still alive? It chilled my bones, I tell you! Scared to death, I was! So I called the cops. The last thing I could’ve imagined was that it was Mr. Inspector, come to do his personal business right here! The last thing!”

The conclusion reached by the widow Concetta Lo Mascolo (nee Burgio), which was shared by all present, rested on ironclad logic. Montalbano, already lost at sea, hadn’t the strength to react. He stood in the doorway, in shock. It was Mimi Augello who finally reacted. Putting his gun back in his holster, he pushed the inspector violently back inside the apartment with one hand and at the same time started yelling so loudly that the tenants began to flee at once.

“That’s enough! Go back to bed! Move it! There’s nothing to see here!”

Then, closing the door behind him, dark-faced, he came towards the inspector.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, bringing a woman in here! Tell her to come out, so we can think of a way to get her out of the building without triggering another insurrection.”

Montalbano didn’t answer, but went into the bedroom, followed by Mimi.

“Is she hiding in the bathroom?” asked Augello.

The inspector turned the tape back on, lowering the volume.

“There’s the girl,” he said.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. Augello gawked at the television screen, then suddenly collapsed into a chair.