linger awhile.”
“So when?”
“Actually, on second thought, I think we could do it tomorrow morning, but first thing. What time do you usually get to the office?”
“Around eight.”
“Eight o’clock would be fine with me. It won’t take but a few minutes.”
“Listen, Counselor, precisely because you will have so little time tomorrow morning, could you perhaps tell me in advance what it’s about?”
“Over the phone?”
“Just a hint.”
“All right. I have heard—though I don’t know how much truth there is in the rumor—that an object found by chance on the ground was turned over to you. I’ve been instructed to reclaim it.”
Montalbano covered the receiver with one hand and literally exploded in a horselike whinny, a mighty guffaw. He had baited the Jacomuzzi hook with the necklace, and the trap had worked like a charm, catching the biggest fish he could ever have hoped for. But how did Jacomuzzi manage to let everyone know things he wasn’t supposed to let anyone know? Did he resort to lasers, to telepathy, to magical shamanistic practices? Montalbano heard Rizzo yelling on the line.
“Hello? Hello? I can’t hear you! What happened, did we get cut off ?”
“No, excuse me, I dropped my pencil and was looking for it. I’ll see you tomorrow at eight.”
~
As soon as he heard the doorbell ring, he put the pasta in the water and went to the door.
“So what’s for supper?” asked Zito as he entered.
“Pasta with garlic and oil, and shrimp with oil and lemon.”
“Excellent.”
“Come into the kitchen and give me a hand.
Meanwhile, my first question is: can you say ‘improcrastinable’?”
“Have you gone soft in the head? You make me race all the way from Montelusa to ask me if I can say some word? Anyway, of course I can say it. No problem.”
He tried to say it three or four times, with increasing obstinacy, but he couldn’t do it, getting more and more marble-mouthed with each try.
“You have to be very adroit, very adroit,” said the inspector, thinking of Rizzo, and he wasn’t referring only to the lawyer’s adroitness in casually uttering tongue twisters.
As they ate, they spoke of eating, as always happens in Italy. Zito, after reminiscing about the heavenly shrimp he had enjoyed ten years earlier at Fiacca, criticized these for being a little overdone and regretted that they lacked a hint of parsley.
“So how is it that you’ve all turned British at the Free Channel?” Montalbano broke in without warning, as they were drinking an exquisite white wine his father had found near Randazzo. He had come by with six bottles the previous week, but it was merely an excuse for them to spend a little time together.
“In what sense, British?”
“In the sense that you’ve refrained from dragging Luparello through the mud, as you would certainly have done in the past. Jesus Christ, the man dies of a heart attack in a kind of open-air brothel among whores, pimps, and buggers, his trousers down around his ankles—it’s downright obscene—and you guys, instead of seizing the moment for all it’s worth, you all toe the line and cast a veil of mercy over how he died.”
“We’re not really in the habit of taking advantage of such things.”
Montalbano started laughing.
“Would you do me a favor, Nicolo? Would you and everyone else at the Free Channel please go fuck yourselves?”
Zito started laughing in turn.
“All right, here’s what happened. A few hours after the body was found, Counselor Rizzo dashed over to see Baron Filo di Baucina, the ‘red baron,’ a millionaire but a Communist, and begged him, with hands folded, not to let the Free Channel mention the circumstances of Luparello’s death. He appealed to the sense of chivalry that the baron’s ancestors seem, long ago, to have possessed. As you know, the baron owns eighty percent of the network. Simple as that.”
“Simple as that, my ass. And so you, Nicolo Zito, who have won the admiration of your adversaries for always saying what needed to be said, you just say ‘yes, sir’ to the baron and lie down?”
“What color is my hair?” asked Zito by way of reply.
“It’s red.”
“I’m red inside and out, Montalbano. I belong to the bad, rancorous Communists, an endangered species.
I accepted the whole bit because I was convinced that those who were saying we shouldn’t sully the poor bastard’s memory by dwelling on the circumstances of his death actually wished him ill, not well, as they were trying to make us think.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, let me explain, my innocent friend. The quickest way to make people forget a scandal is to talk about it as much as possible, on television, in the papers, and so on. Over and over you flog the same dead horse, and pretty soon people start getting fed up.
