“I’ll come with you.”
The cook was in the process of giving his assistant a serious tongue-lashing for having poorly cleaned the pans.
“When you do that, they end up tasting like yesterday’s food and nobody can tell what they’re eating anymore.”
“Listen,” said Montalbano, “is it true you’ve never been outside of Sicily?”
He must have inadvertently assumed a coplike tone, because Tanino seemed suddenly to have returned to his days as a delinquent.
“Never, Inspector, I swear! I got witnesses!” Therefore he could never have learned that dish from some foreign restaurant.
“Have you ever had any dealings with Indians?”
“Like in the movies? Redskins?”
“Never mind,” said Montalbano. And he said good-bye to the miraculous cook, giving him a hug.
o o o
In the five days he’d been away—as Fazio reported to him—
nothing of any importance had happened. Carmelo Arnone, the man with the tobacco shop near the train station, had fired four shots at Angelo Cannizzaro, haberdasher, over a woman. Mimi Augello, who happened to be in the area, had courageously confronted the gunman and disarmed him.
“So,” Montalbano commented, “Cannizzaro came away with little more than a good scare.”
It was well known to everyone in town that Carmelo Arnone didn’t know how to handle a gun and couldn’t even hit a cow at point-blank range.
“Well, no.”
“He hit him?” asked Montalbano, stunned.
Actually, Fazio went on to explain, he hadn’t hit his target this time either. One of the bullets, though, after striking a lamppost, had ricocheted back and ended up between Cannizzaro’s shoulder blades. The wound was nothing, the bullet had lost all its force by then. But in no time the rumor had spread all over town that the cowardly Carmelo Arnone had shot Angelo Cannizzaro in the back. So Cannizzaro’s brother, Pasqualino, who dealt in fava beans and wore glasses with lenses an inch thick, armed himself, tracked down Carmelo Arnone, and shot at him, missing twice. That is, he missed both the target and the identity of the target. Deceived by a strong family resemblance, he had mistaken Carmelo’s brother Filippo, who owned a fruit-and-vegetable store, for Carmelo himself. As for missing the target, the first shot had ended up God-knows-where, while the second had injured the pinky on the left hand of a shopkeeper from Canicatti who’d come to Vigata on business. At this point the pistol had jammed, otherwise Pasqualino Cannizzaro, firing blindly, would surely have wrought another slaughter of the innocents.
Ah and, also, there were two robberies, four purse snatch-ings, and three cars torched. Routine stuff.
There was a knock at the door, and Tortorella came in after pushing the door open with his foot, arms laden with a good six or seven pounds of papers.
“Shall we make good use of your time while you’re here?”
“Tortore, you make it sound like I’ve been away for a hundred years!”
Since he never signed anything without first carefully reading what it was about, Montalbano had barely dispatched a couple of pounds of documents when it was already lunchtime. Though he felt some stirring in the pit of his stomach, he decided not to go to the Trattoria San Calogero.
He wasn’t ready yet to desecrate the memory of Tanino, the cook directly inspired by the Madonna. The betrayal, when it came, would have to be justified, at least in part, by absti-nence.
He finished signing papers at eight that evening, with aches not only in his fingers, but in his whole arm.
o o o
By the time he got home, he was ravenous; in the pit of his stomach there now was a hole. How should he proceed?
Should he open the oven and fridge and see what Adelina had made for him? He reasoned that, if going from one restaurant to another could technically be called a betrayal, to go from Tanino to Adelina certainly could not. Rather, it might be better defined as a return to the family fold after an adulterous interlude. The oven was empty. In the fridge he found ten or so olives, three sardines, and a bit of Lampedu-san tuna in a small glass jar. On the kitchen table there was some bread wrapped in paper, next to a note from the housekeeper.
She didn’t want to go on wasting things, clearly, but more importantly, she must have felt offended because he hadn’t told her where he was going (“All right, so Ima just a maid, sir, but sommatime you treeta me jes like a maid!”).
He listlessly ate a couple of olives with bread, which he decided to accompany with some of his father’s wine. He turned the television on to the Free Channel. It was time for the news.
Nicolo Zito was finishing up a commentary on the arrest of a town councilman in Fela for embezzlement and graft. Then he moved on to the latest stories. On the outskirts of Sommatina, between Caltanissetta and Enna, a woman’s body had been recovered in an advanced state of decomposition.
Montalbano bolted upright in his armchair.
