his housekeeper, call to him from the kitchen.
“You awake, signore?”
“Yes, but my head hurts. Want to bet the old lady broke it?”
“Even bombs couldna brake dat head of yours, signore.”
The telephone rang. He tried to get up, but a sort of vertigo knocked him back down into bed. How could that old bag have had such strength in her arms? Adelina, meanwhile, answered the phone. He heard her saying:
“He jes’ woke uppa now. Okay, I tell him.”
She appeared with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand.
“Dat was Signor Fazziu. He says he comma to see you here in haffa nour atta most.”
“Adeli, what time did you get here?”
“At nine, as usual, signore. They ha’ put you inna bed, an’ Signor Gallu he stay behind to help. So I says, now I’m here, I can look afta you, an’ so he left.”
She went out of the room and came back with a glass in one hand and a pill in the other.
“I brung you some aspirin.”
Obediently, Montalbano took it. Sitting up in bed, he felt a few chills run through his body. Adelina noticed and, muttering to herself, opened the armoire, grabbed a plaid blanket, and spread it over the bedspread.
“At your age, signore, you got no business doin’ them kinda things.”
At that moment, Montalbano loathed her. He pulled the blanket up over his head and closed his eyes.
He heard the telephone ringing repeatedly. Why didn’t Adelina answer it? He staggered to his feet and went into the living room.
“H’lo?” he said in a congested voice.
“Inspector? Fazio here. I can’t come, I’m sorry to say. There’s been a snag.”
“Anything serious?”
“No, little shit. I’ll drop by in the afternoon. You take care of that cold in the meantime.”
He hung up and went in the kitchen. Adelina was gone. She’d left a note on the table.
He didn’t feel like opening the refrigerator. He had no appetite. Realizing he was walking around naked as Adam, he put on a shirt, a pair of underpants, and some trousers, and sat down in his usual armchair in front of the TV. It was a quarter to one, time for the midday news on TeleVigata, a progovernment station whether the government was of the extreme Left or extreme Right. The first thing he saw was himself, stark naked, wild-eyed, mouth agape, hands cupped over his pudenda, looking like a chaste Susannah getting on in years, and a whole lot hairier. A caption under the image said:
“Inspector Montalbano (in the photo) saving a dead man.”
Montalbano remembered the photographer who had arrived behind Fazio and Gallo, and sent him, in his mind, best wishes for a long and prosperous life. Then the purse-lipped, chicken-ass face of Pippo Ragonese, the inspector’s sworn enemy, appeared on the screen.
“Shortly after sunrise this morning . . .”
For those who might not understand, a generic shot of a sunrise appeared.
“... our hero, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, went out for a nice long swim . . .”
A stretch of sea appeared, with some guy swimming far in the distance, tiny and unrecognizable.
“You’re probably thinking that not only is it no longer the season for swimming, but it’s not really the most appropriate time of day for it, either. But what are you going to do? That’s our hero for you. Maybe he felt the need to take a dip to dispel the strange ideas that are often swirling about in his brain. Swimming far offshore, he ran into the corpse of an unknown man. Instead of calling the authorities . . .”
“. . . with the cell phone installed in my dick,” Montalbano chimed in, enraged.
“... our inspector decided to tow the corpse to shore without anyone’s help, tying it to his leg with the bathing suit he was wearing. ‘I can do it all myself,’ that’s his motto. These maneuvers did not escape the attention of Signora Pina Bausan, who had been looking out to sea with a pair of binoculars.”
On-screen appeared the face of Signora Bausan, the lady who’d cracked his skull with an iron bar.
“Where are you from, signora?”
“My husband Angelo and I are both from Treviso.”
“Have you been in Sicily long?”
“We got here four days ago.”
“On vacation?”
“This is no vacation, believe me. I suffer from asthma, and my doctor told me that some sea air would do me good. My daughter Zina is married to a Sicilian who works in Treviso . . .” Here Signora Bausan interrupted her speech with a long, pained sigh, as if to lament the fate that had given her a Sicilian for a son-in-law. “... And she told me to come and stay here, at her husband’s house, which they use only one month out of the year, in the summer. So we came.”
The pained sigh was even longer this time. Life is so hard and dangerous on that savage island!
