Excursion to Tindari

whether to come inside, a smile cutting his face in two. He had a videocassette in one hand and was shaking it under the inspector’s nose.

“Have you ever seen The Getaway, a film with—”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it.”

“Did you like it?”

“Rather.”

“This version’s better.”

“Mimi, are you going to come inside or not? Follow me to the kitchen, coffee’s ready.”

He poured a cup for himself and one for Mimi, who’d come in behind him.

“Let’s go into the other room,” said Mimi.

He’d drunk down his cup in one gulp, surely scalding his pipes, but he was too pressed, too impatient to show Montalbano what he’d discovered and, above all, to glory in his own intuition. He slipped in the cassette, so excited that he tried to put it in upside down. He cursed, righted it, and turned it on. After some twenty minutes of The Getaway, which Mimi sped up, there were another five of blank screen, with only dancing white dots and fried audio. Mimi turned the sound off entirely.

“I don’t think they say anything,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘you don’t think’?”

“Well, I didn’t watch it straight through. I jumped around a bit.”

Then an image appeared. A double bed covered with a snow-white sheet, two pillows propped up as headrests, one leaning directly against the light green wall. There were also two elegant nightstands of light wood. It wasn’t Sanfilippo’s bedroom. Another minute passed without anything happening, but it was clear that somebody was fiddling with the camera, trying to get the focus right. All that white created too much glare. Darkness ensued. Then the same shot reappeared, but tighter, the nightstands no longer visible. This time there was a thirtyish woman on the bed, completely naked, with a magnificent tan, in a full-length shot. The hair removal stood out because, in that area, her skin was ivory white; apparently it had been shielded from the sun’s rays by a G-string. At the first sight of her, the inspector felt a tremor. He knew her, surely! Where had they met? A second later, he corrected himself. No, he didn’t know her, but he had, in a way, seen her before. In the pages of a book, in a reproduction. Because the woman, with her long, long legs and pelvis resting on the bed and the remainder of her body raised up by pillows, leaning slightly to the left, hands folded behind her head, was a dead ringer for Goya’s Naked Maja. But it wasn’t only her pose that gave Montalbano this mistaken impression: the unknown woman also wore her hair the same way as the Maja, and had the faintest hint of a smile on her face.

Like the Mona Lisa, the inspector thought, by this point thinking in terms of painterly comparisons.

The camera remained stationary, as though spellbound by the image it was recording. On the sheet and pillows, the unknown woman was perfectly at ease, relaxed and in her element. A creature of the bed.

“Is she the one you thought of when reading the letters?”

“Yes,” said Augello.

Can a monosyllable contain all the pride in the world? Mimi had managed to fit it all in there.

“But how did you do it? It seems like you’ve only seen her a few times in passing. And always with her clothes on.”

“You see, in the letters, he paints her. Actually, no. It’s not a portrait. It’s more like an engraving.”

Why, when people spoke of her, did this woman bring to mind the language of art?

“For example,” Mimi continued, “he talks about the disproportion between the length of her legs and the length of her torso, which, if you look closely, should probably be a little longer. Then he describes her hair, the shape of her eyes—”

“I get the picture,” Montalbano cut him short, feeling envious. No doubt about it, Mimi had an eye for women.

Meanwhile the camera had zoomed in on her feet, then ever so slowly ascended the length of her body, lingering momentarily over the pubis, navel, and nipples, before pausing at her eyes.

How was it that the woman’s pupils shone with an inner light so intense as to surround her gaze in an aura of hypnotic phosphorescence? What was she, some sort of dangerous nocturnal animal? He looked more closely and reassured himself. Those were not the eyes of a witch. The pupils were merely reflecting the light of the floods used by Nene Sanfilippo to better illuminate the set. The camera moved on to her mouth.The lips, two flames filling the screen, moved and parted; the catlike tip of the tongue peeped out, traced the contour of the upper lip, then the lower lip. Nothing vulgar about it, but the two men watching were dumbstruck by the violent sensuality of the gesture.

“Rewind and turn the volume up all the way,” Montalbano said suddenly.

“Why?”

“She said something, I’m sure of it.”

Mimi obeyed. The moment the shot of the mouth reappeared, a man’s voice murmured something incomprehensible.

“Yes,” the woman replied distinctly, then began running her tongue over her lips.

So there was sound. Not much, but it was there. Augello left it on high volume.

The camera then went down her neck, passing lightly over it like a loving hand, from left to right and right to left again, and again, an ecstatic caress. In fact they heard a soft moan, from the woman.