The colonel looked at him with admiration.
“You know that too? He’s one of our men who would periodically go and check up on things.”
“And while he was at it, he would fuck Karima.”
“These things happen. Finally Fahrid persuaded Ahmed to come to Italy by tempting him with the prospect of a big weapons shipment. As always with our invisible protection, Ahmed Moussa arrived at Mazara, according to Fahrid’s instructions. Under pressure from the chief of the prefect’s cabinet, the captain of the fishing boat agreed to take Ahmed aboard, since the meeting between Ahmed and the imaginary arms dealer was supposed to take place on the open sea.
Without the slightest suspicion, Ahmed Moussa walked into the trap. He even lit a cigarette, as he’d been told to do, so that they might better recognize each other. But Commendator Spadaccia, the cabinet chief, made a big mistake.” “He hadn’t warned the captain that it would not be a clandestine meeting, but an ambush,” said Montalbano.
“You could say that. The captain, as he’d been told to do, threw Ahmed’s papers into the sea and divided the seventy million lire the Arab had in his pocket with the rest of the crew. Then, instead of returning to Mazara, he changed course. He had his doubts about us.” “Oh?”
“You see, we had steered our motor patrols away from the scene of the action, and the captain knew this. If that’s the situation, he must have thought, who’s to say I won’t run into something on the way back in—a missile, a mine, even another motor patrol that would sink my boat to destroy all trace of the operation? That’s why he came to Vigata. He was shuffling the cards.” “Had he guessed right?”
“In what sense?”
“Was there someone or something waiting for the fishing boat?”
“Come now, Montalbano! That would have been a useless massacre!”
“And you engage only in useful massacres, is that it? And how do you plan to keep the crew quiet?”
“With the carrot and the stick, to quote again that writer you don’t appreciate. In any case, I’ve said everything I had to say.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean: that’s not everything. You have very cleverly taken me out to sea, but I haven’t forgotten those left behind on land. Fahrid, for example. He must have learned, from one of your informers, that Ahmed had been killed; but the fishing boat had docked at Vigata, inexplicably—for him.
This troubled him. At any rate, he must now proceed to the second part of his assignment. That is, neutralizing, as you put it, Lapecora. So he shows up at the guy’s front door and, to his amazement and alarm, finds out that somebody got there first. And so he shits in his pants.” “I beg your pardon?”
“He gets scared, he no longer knows what is happening.
Like the captain of the fishing boat, he thinks your people are behind it. It looks to him like you’ve begun removing from circulation everyone who was in some way involved in the operation. For a moment, perhaps, he suspects it might have been Karima who did away with Lapecora. You may not know this, but Karima, under orders from Fahrid, forced Lapecora to hide her in his apartment; Fahrid didn’t want Lapecora to get any brilliant ideas during those critical hours.
Fahrid, however, didn’t know that once she’d carried out her mission, Karima had gone back home. In any event, at some point that morning, Fahrid met up with Karima, and the two must have had a violent argument in the course of which he told her that her brother had been killed. Karima then tried to escape. She failed, and she was murdered. She would have had to be eliminated anyway, at some later point, on the quiet.” “As I’d suspected,” said Lohengrin Pera, “you’ve figured it all out. Now I ask you to pause and think. You, like me, are a loyal, devoted servant of our state. And so—”
“Stick it up your ass,” Montalbano said softly.
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me repeat: you can take our state and stick it up your ass. You and I have diametrically opposed concepts of what it means to be a servant of the state. For all intents and purposes, we serve two different states. So I beg you please not to liken your work to mine.” “So now you want to play Don Quixote, Montalbano?
Every community needs someone to wash the toilets. But this does not mean that those who wash the toilets are not part of the community.”
Montalbano felt his rage growing; one more word would surely have been a mistake. He reached out with one hand, brought the dish of ice cream nearer, and began to eat. By now Lohengrin Pera had got used to the ritual, and once Montalbano started nibbling the ice cream, he stopped talking.
“Karima was killed, correct?” asked Montalbano after a few spoonfuls.
“Unfortunately, yes. Fahrid was afraid that—”
“I’m not interested in why. I’m interested in the fact that she was killed by the authority of a loyal servant of the state such as yourself. How would you call this specific case, neutralization or murder?” “Montalbano, you can’t use the standard of common morality—”
“Colonel, I already warned you once: do not speak of morality in my presence.”
“I merely meant that sometimes, the reason of state—”
“That’s enough,” said Montalbano, who had wolfed down the ice cream in four angry bites. Then, suddenly, he slapped his forehead.
“What time is it, anyway?”
The colonel looked at his wristwatch, a dainty, precious item that looked like a child’s toy.
