“Chief, is that really you yourself ?”
“Cat, it’s really me myself. Been any calls?”
“Yessir, Chief. Two for Inspector Augello, one for—”
“Cat, I don’t give a fuck about other people’s phone calls!”
“But you asked me yourself just now!”
“All right, Cat: have there been any phone calls person ally for me myself ?”
By making the necessary linguistic adjustments, maybe he would get a sane answer.
“Yessir, Chief. There was one. But it didn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t make sense?”
“I couldn’t understand anything. But I think they were relatives.”
“Whose relatives?”
“Yours, Chief. They called you by your first name: Salvo, Salvo.”
“Then what?”
“Then they sounded like they were in pain, or sneezing or something. They said: ‘Aiee . . . sha! Aiee . . . sha!’ ”
“Wait, who was ‘they’? Was it a man or a woman?”
“An old woman, Chief.”
Aisha! He dashed out the door, forgetting to say good-bye to Aliotta.
o o o
Aisha was sitting in front of her house, upset and weeping.
No, Karima and Francois had not shown up; she’d called him for another reason. She stood up and led him inside. The room had been turned upside down; they’d even gutted the mattress. Want to bet they’d taken the bank book? No, that they didn’t find, Aisha said reassuringly.
Upstairs, where Karima lived, it was even worse. Some flagstones had been torn out of the floor; one of Francois’s toys, a little plastic truck, was in pieces. The photographs were all gone, including the ones advertising Karima’s charms.
Where had Aisha run off to in the meantime? She hadn’t run off, the old woman explained. The previous day she’d gone to see a friend in Montelusa. It got late, and so she slept over.
A stroke of luck: if they’d found her at home, they would certainly have cut her throat. They must have had keys; neither of the doors, in fact, had been forced. Surely they’d come for the photos; they wanted to erase the very memory of what Karima looked like.
Montalbano told the old woman to gather her things together. He was going to take her himself to her friend’s house in Montelusa. She would have to remain there for a few days, just to be safe. Aisha glumly agreed to go. The inspector explained that while she was getting ready, he was going out to the nearest tobacco shop and would be back in ten minutes at most.
o o o
A short distance before the tobacco shop, in front of the Villaseta elementary school, there was a noisy gathering of ges-ticulating mothers and weepy children. They were laying siege to two municipal policemen from Vigata who’d been detached to Villaseta and whom Montalbano knew. He drove on, bought his cigarettes, but on the way back, curiosity got the better of him. He pushed through the crowd, invoking his authority, deafened by the shouting.
“They bothered you about this bullshit too?” asked one of the policemen in amazement.
“No, I just happened to be passing by. What’s going on?” The mothers, who heard his question, answered all at once, with the result that the inspector understood nothing.
“Quiet!” he yelled.
The mothers fell silent, but the children, now terrified, started wailing even louder.
“The whole thing’s ridiculous, Inspector,” said the same policeman as before. “Apparently, since yesterday morning, there’s been some little kid attacking the other kids on their way to school. He steals their food and then runs away. He did the same thing this morning.” “Looka here, looka here,” one mother butted in, showing Montalbano a little boy with puffy eyes from being punched. “My son din’t wanna give ’im ’is omelette, and so
’e ’it ’im! An’ ’e really ’urt ’im!”
The inspector bent down and stroked the little boy’s head.
“What’s your name?”
“ ’Ntonio,” said the little boy, proud to have been the one chosen from the crowd.
“Do you know this boy who stole your omelette?”
“No sir.”
“Is there anyone here who recognized him?” the inspector asked in a loud voice. There was a chorus of “No.” Montalbano leaned back down to ’Ntonio.
“What did he say to you? How did you know he wanted your omelette?”
