Excursion to Tindari

excellent computer technician, and there must be plenty of computers at the Montelusa clinic. When Nene first hooked up with Vanya, he didn’t know she was the doctor’s wife. When he finds out—maybe because she told him —they’re already taken with each other. It’s all so clear.”

“Bah!” said Ingrid, skeptical.

“Look: the kid says he’s made a mistake. And he’s right, because he’s definitely lost his job. And the doctor sends his wife away because he’s afraid of the consequences, the gossip ... Say the two got some bright idea, like running away together ... Better not to let them have the opportunity.”

From the look Ingrid gave him, Montalbano realized that she was not convinced by his explanations. But since that was the way she was, she didn’t ask any more questions.

After Ingrid left, he remained seated on the veranda. The trawlers were heading out of the port to fish through the night. He didn’t want to think about anything. Then he heard a harmonious sound, very close by. Somebody was whistling softly. Who? He looked around. There was nobody. It was him! He was the one whistling! As soon as he realized this, he couldn’t whistle anymore. Therefore there were moments when, like a double, he could actually whistle. He started laughing.

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he mumbled.

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

The third time he was no longer laughing. In fact he had turned dead serious. His forehead was sweating a little.

He filled his glass with straight whisky.

“Chief! Chief!” said Catarella, running after him. “I gots this letter here I’s a sposta give to you poissonally since yesterday. ‘Sfrom that lawyer Guttadadaro, who said I’m only sposta give it to you poissonally in poisson!”

He dug it out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to Montalbano. The inspector opened it.

Esteemed Inspector, the person you know, my client and friend, had intended to write you a letter expressing his increased admiration in your regard. He changed his mind, however, and asked instead that I inform you he will be calling you by phone. Most respectfully yours, Guttadauro.

He tore it up into little pieces and went into Augello’s office. Mimi was at his desk.

“I’m writing the report,” he said.

“Fuck it,” said Montalbano.

“What’s going on?” Augello asked, alarmed. “I don’t like the look on your face.”

“Did you bring me the novel?”

“Sanfilippo’s? Yes.”

He pointed at a large envelope on the desk. The inspector picked it up and put it under his arm.

“What’s wrong?” Augello insisted.

The inspector didn’t answer.

“I’m going home to Marinella. Don’t let anyone call me there. I’ll be back at the station around midnight. I want you all here.”

17

Once outside the police station, his great desire to hole up at Marinella and start reading suddenly disappeared the way the wind sometimes does, uprooting trees one moment and vanishing the next, as if it had never existed. He got in his car and drove towards the port. When he arrived in the neighborhood, he stopped the car and got out, bringing along the envelope. The truth of the matter was that he couldn’t muster up the courage to read it: he was afraid of finding in Nene Sanfilippo’s words a stinging confirmation of an idea that had occurred to him after Ingrid left. He walked slowly, deliberately, to the lighthouse and sat down on the flat rock. He smelled the strong, acrid odor of the lippo, the greeny down that grows on the lower half of the rocks, the part in contact with the sea. He glanced at his watch: there was still an hour of light remaining. He could, if he wanted, start reading right there. But he still didn’t feel like it; he wasn’t up to it. What if Sanfilippo’s writing turned out in the end to be a pile of shit, the constipated fantasy of a dilettante who thinks he can write a novel just because he learned how to parse sentences in school? Which isn’t even taught anymore, besides. Another sign—as if he needed any more—of just how far he was getting on in years. But to keep holding those pages in his hand, unable to decide one way or another, made his skin crawl. Maybe it was better to go back to Marinella and start reading on the veranda. He would be breathing the same sea air.

At a glance he realized that Nene Sanfilippo, to hide what he really had to say, had resorted to the same method he used in filming the naked Vanya. In that instance the tape had begun with some twenty minutes of The Getaway; here the first pages were copied from a famous novel: Asimov’s I, Robot.

It took Montalbano two hours to read the whole thing. The closer he got to the end, the clearer what Nene Sanfilippo was saying became to him, and the more often his hand reached out for the whisky bottle.

The novel had no ending. It broke off in the middle of a sentence. But what he’d read was more than enough for him. From the pit of his stomach a violent spasm of nausea rose up and seized his throat. He ran to the bathroom, barely able to stand, knelt down in front of the toilet and started to vomit. He vomited the whisky he’d just drunk, vomited what he’d eaten that day as well as what he’d eaten the day before, and the day before that, and he felt, with his sweaty head now entirely inside the toilet bowl and a sharp pain in his side, as if he were endlessly vomiting up the entire time of his life on earth, going all the way back to the pap he was given as a baby,