To tell him, he spent every last piece of change but one.
o o o
“Mimi? Montalbano here. Were you sleeping?”
“No, I was dancing. What the fuck did you expect?”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Hell, yes! After the position you put me in!”
“Me? What position?”
“Sending me to take away the kid. Livia looked at me with hatred. I had to tear him out of her arms. It made me feel sick to my stomach.”
“Where’d you take Francois?”
“To Calapiano, to my sister’s.”
“Is it safe there?”
“Very safe. She and her husband have a great big house with a farm, three miles from the village, very isolated. My sister has two boys, one of them the same age as Francois.
He’ll be fine there. It took me two and a half hours to get there, and two and a half to drive back.”
“Tired, eh?”
“Very tired. I won’t be in tomorrow morning.”
“All right, you won’t be in, but I want you at my house, in Marinella, by nine at the latest.”
“What for?”
“To pick Livia up and drive her to the Palermo airport.”
“Okay.”
“How come you’re suddenly not so tired anymore, eh, Mimi?”
o o o
Livia was now having a troubled sleep, groaning from time to time. Montalbano closed the bedroom door, sat down in the armchair, and turned on the television at very low volume.
On TeleVigata, Galluzzo’s brother-in-law was saying that the Foreign Ministry in Tunis had issued a statement regarding some erroneous information about the unfortunate killing of a Tunisian fisherman aboard an Italian motor trawler that had entered Tunisian waters. The statement denied the wild rumors according to which the fisherman was not, in fact, a fisherman, but the rather well-known journalist Ben Dhahab.
It was an obvious case of two men with the same name, since Ben Dhahab the journalist was alive and well and still working. In the city of Tunis alone, the statement went on to say, there are more than twenty men named Ben Dhahab. Montalbano turned off the television. So the tide had started to turn, and people were running for cover, raising fences, putting up smoke screens.
o o o
He heard a car pull up and stop in the clearing in front of the house. The inspector rushed to the door to open up. It was Nicolo.
“I got here as fast as I could,” he said, entering.
“Thanks.”
“Livia’s asleep?” the newsman asked, looking around.
“Yes. She’s leaving for Genoa tomorrow morning.”
“I’m so sorry I won’t have a chance to say good-bye to her.”
“Nicolo, did you bring the videocamera?”
The newsman reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gadget no larger than four packs of cigarettes stacked two by two.
“Here you are. I’m going home to bed.”
“No you’re not. First you have to hide this somewhere it won’t be visible.”
“How am I going to do that, if Livia’s sleeping in the next room?”
“Nicolo, I don’t know why you’ve got it into your head that I want to film myself fucking. I want you to set up the camera in this room.”
“Tell me what it is you want to film.”
“A conversation between me and a man sitting exactly where you are now.”
Nicolo looked straight ahead and smiled.
“Those shelves full of books seem like they were put there for that very purpose.”
Taking a chair from the table, he set it next to the bookcase and climbed up on it. He shuffled a few books, set up the camera, sat back down where he was before, and looked up.
“From here you can’t see it,” he said, satisfied. “Come and check for yourself.”
