'Yeah.'
'Gege will be happy, wherever he is.'
Mariannina sighed and squeezed the inspector's hand a little harder.
'Gege loved you with all his soul.'
'I loved him, too,' he said.
'Do you remember how naughty he was?'
And a naughty boy he was, mischievous, bad. Clearly Mariannina was not referring to recent years, when Gege had his run-ins with the law, but to a distant time when her younger brother was a restless little scamp. Montalbano smiled.
'Do you remember the time he threw a firecracker into a copper cauldron that someone was repairing, and the blast made the poor guy faint?'
'And the time he emptied his inkwell into Mrs. Longo's purse?'
They talked about Gege and his exploits for nearly two hours, recounting episodes that never went beyond his adolescence.
'It's getting late,' said Montalbano. 'I should go.'
'I'd like to tell you to stay for dinner, but what I made is probably too heavy for you.'
'What did you make?'
'Attuppateddri in tomato sauce.'
Attuppateddri were small light-brown snails which, when they went into hibernation, would secrete a fluid that solidified into a white sheet, which served to close attuppari in Sicilian the entrance to the shell. Montalbano's first impulse was to decline in disgust. How long would this obsession continue to torment him? In the end, he coolly decided to accept, as a twofold challenge to his stomach and his psyche. With the plate in front of him giving off an exquisite, ochre-colored scent, he had to steel himself, but after extracting the first attuppateddri with a pin and tasting it, he suddenly felt liberated: with the obsession gone and the melancholy banished, there was no doubt the belly, too, would adjust.
...
At headquarters he was smothered by embraces. Tortorella even wiped away a tear.
'I know what it means to come back after being shot!' said the officer.
'Where's Augello?'
'In his office, your office,' said Catarella.
He opened the door without knocking and Mim leapt out of the chair behind the desk as if he'd been caught stealing. He blushed.
'I haven't touched anything. It's just that from here, the phone calls'
'Mim, you did absolutely the right thing,' Montalbano cut him short, repressing the urge to kick him in the ass for having dared to sit in his place.
'I was planning to come to your house today', said Augello.
'To do what?'
'To arrange protection.'
Protection? For whom?
'For whom?'
'For you, of course. There's no saying they won't try again, after coming up empty the first time.'
'You're wrong. Nothing more's going to happen to me. Because, you see, Mim, it was you who had me shot.'
Augello turned so red, he looked as though someone had inserted a high-voltage plug up his bum. He started trembling. Then all his blood disappeared God-knows-where, leaving him pale as a corpse.
'Where do you get these ideas?' he managed to mutter awkwardly.
Montalbano reckoned he'd sufficiently avenged himself for the expropriation of his desk.
'Calm down, Mim. That's not what I meant to say. What I meant was: it was you who set the mechanism in motion that led to my shooting.'
'Explain yourself,' said Augello, collapsing into the chair and dabbing all around his mouth and forehead with his handkerchief.
'You, my good friend, without consulting me, without asking if I agreed or not, put two officers on Ingrassia's tail. Did you really think he was so stupid he wouldn't notice? It took him maybe half a day to find out he was being shadowed. And he understandably thought it was me who gave the order. He knew he'd fucked up a couple of times and that I had him in my sights, and so, to brush up his image for Brancato, who was planning to get rid of him, it was you who related their phone conversation to me, he hired two assholes to eliminate me. Except that his scheme turned into a fiasco. By this time Brancato, or somebody else, got fed up with Ingrassia and his brilliant ideas don't forget the pointless little murder of poor Cavaliere Misuraca and so they took matters in hand and made him vanish from the face of the earth. If you hadn't put Ingrassia on his guard, Gege would still be alive and I wouldn't have this pain in my side. And there you have it.'
'If that's how things went ...I guess you're right,' said Mim annihilated.
