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1
The alarm clock started ringing wildly.
Eyes still closed, Montalbano reached out towards the nightstand with one hand and, feeling around, tried to turn it off, worried that the noise would wake up Livia, who was sleeping beside him.
But his fingers knocked into a glass that first tipped over and then fell to the floor.
He cursed the saints. Then he immediately heard Livia giggle. He turned towards her.
"Did the alarm-?"
"No, I'd been awake for a while."
"Really? What were you doing?"
"What do you mean what was I doing? I was waiting for daybreak and watching you."
Montalbano thought that the back of his head must constitute a rather boring landscape.
"Did you know that lately you sometimes whistle in your sleep?" asked Livia.
Upon hearing this revelation, Montalbano, for whatever reason, got irritated.
"How could I know that if I'm asleep? Anyway, be more specific. What do I whistle, pop songs, opera, or what?"
"Calm down! Are you offended or something? All right, to be more precise, you sometimes emit a kind of whistling sound."
"Through my nose?"
"I don't know."
"Next time, pay attention to whether I whistle through my nose or my mouth, and let me know."
"Why, does it make a difference?"
"Yes, it makes a huge difference. I remember reading something once about a guy whose nose made a whistling sound and it later turned out to be a symptom of a deadly disease."
"Oh, come on! And, by the way, I had a bad dream."
"Want to tell me about it?"
"I'm sitting and reading on a veranda exactly like ours, except that it gives onto the docks at the port. At some point I hear this big commotion of voices, and I see a man crying for help and being chased by another man ordering him to stop. The guy running away has a scarf around his head, a bandanna, something tied under his chin. The man giving chase is wearing a large belt with a lot of sharp knives tucked into it. At a certain point the man being chased finds himself up against the broadside of a barge. He has a moment of hesitation, and the pursuer takes advantage of this to throw one of his knives, which strikes the man in the nape of the neck, plunges all the way through, and comes out the front of his throat, nailing him to the wood of the barge. Just horrible. So the pursuer stops and starts throwing more knives at the victim, tracing the outline of his body against the boat. Then he suddenly turns and takes a step towards me. But luckily at that point I woke up."
"We sort of overdid it last night with the baby octopus!" was Montalbano's comment.
"And did you dream anything?" Livia asked.
At that moment the alarm went off. But how was that possible? It had rung just five minutes earlier!
Head still numb with sleep, the inspector opened his eyes and immediately realized he was in bed. There was no Livia. She was at home, in Boccadasse. He'd dreamt the whole thing, including Livia's dream.
He got up, went into the kitchen, prepared his customary mug of coffee, then got into the shower. Moments later, he was sitting on the veranda, smoking a cigarette while drinking his coffee. The day promised to be a fine one. Everything looked freshly painted, so bright were the colors.
He had no desire whatsoever to go into Vigˆta, or into what at least had been Vigˆta up until a few days earlier. Because in fact the town had put on a completely different face. It had been, well, thrown back in time, turned into the Vigˆta of the 1950s.
This irked Montalbano no end, because it all seemed so fake, as if he was attending a masked ball at Carnival.
The whole business had begun some four or five months earlier, when TeleVigˆta invited its viewers to search their homes for old Super 8 movies, which had been so popular around the middle of the previous century, and to send whatever they found to the studio offices. The television station would later integrate them into a program, a kind of "The Way We Were," about what the town was like in the 1950s.
For whatever reason, the initiative was a resounding success. Perhaps because the whole thing had become a kind of game for the townsfolk, who were having a ball seeing how time had transformed them or their children from toddlers who looked like beautiful little angels just descended from the heavens into toothless, hairless, sickly old geezers, and women who'd once been the light of the town into grannies good mostly for knitting socks.
Then they discovered that all this to-do actually had a specific purpose: All the material gathered was to serve as a visual aid for a production crew that was coming to town to film what is commonly known as a TV movie.
Without fail, a short while later the crew's technicians arrived, half of them Swedish, half of them Italian.
Now the strange thing about all this was that the group of Swedish technicians included some breathtakingly badass babes, who did a variety of odd jobs: as assistant set designers, sound technicians, stagehands, and so on . . . Which left the townsfolk a bit flabbergasted to see such beautiful women having to work, and wondering what the actresses would look like when they finally arrived.
And indeed, when they actually did arrive, work in Vigˆta came to a standstill.
With the flimsiest of excuses, people would drop whatever they were doing and run to the movie set. Things got so bad that law enforcement was asked to keep the rubberneckers away. And law enforcement, in this case, naturally took the form of one Mim“ Augello, who had been put in charge of the patrolmen protecting the film crew, with special attention given to the actresses.
This, in short, reduced the staff at the station house basically to three people: the inspector, Fazio, and Catarella. Luckily it was a period of calm and nothing was happening.
The Vigˆta townscape had changed. Gone were the TV antennas, the rubbish bins, the neon signs. And there was nothing remaining of the shops and stores Montalbano knew so well.
The inspector had had someone tell him the plot of the TV movie. The story was set, naturally, in the 1950s and involved a Swedish girl working as a bosun on a steamship from Kalmar who falls seriously ill during the sea journey and is admitted to the hospital in Montelusa.
Once she recovers her health she goes down to Vigˆta, to be near the port, and is taken in by a fisherman while she waits for her ship to return.
Due to a series of setbacks, the return of her steamship is delayed, and in the meantime the Swedish girl falls in love with a youth from Vigˆta and creates a life for herself in town, while nevertheless maintaining, deep in her heart, a secret hope that her ship will come back for her one day.
And she keeps on nourishing this hope even after she gets married and has a child.
Finally the day comes when the ship returns to harbor, and the young woman decides to board in secret, unbeknownst to her family. She arranges with a sailor to have him take her out to the ship in his boat, but at the last moment the Swedish girl changes her mind and turns back, to her home in Vigˆta.
When Montalbano heard this story, it sounded to him like a plagiarism of a beautiful story by Pirandello entitled "Far Away," in which the main character is not a girl bosun but a Swedish sailor named Lars.
But he didn't say anything to anyone.
As he was drinking his second coffee on the veranda, the phone rang. He went to answer. It was Ingrid.
His Swedish friend had, for the occasion, become the official translator for the film crew.
"Ciao, Salvo."
"What is it?"
Ingrid didn't appreciate the inspector's blunt greeting.
"Are you angry?"
"I think the proper word would be 'irritated.'"
"I'm sorry for you. Don't forget that you have to come to the sister cities ceremony between Vigˆta and Kalmar tonight. It's at eight o'clock sharp at city hall."
"Thanks for the reminder. I'm well aware that my presence is required."
"All right, then. See you later."
Well, wouldn't you know that they would take advantage of the ongoing circus to make the two towns sister cities!
He heard his front door open and then close again.
"Adelina! I'm still here!"
"Matre santissima! Wha'ss wrong, Isspector? You no feeling so good?" asked Adelina, who'd come running.
"No, no, I feel fine. Not a trace of fever, unfortunately. I wanted to ask you if my good suit has been ironed."
"Which one, sir? The rilly dark one that looks like a black seagull?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
"Iss ready."
"Okay, thanks. And you needn't cook anything for me this evening. I'll be eating out."
He pulled up outside the station but couldn't go in because a truck was stopped right in front of the entrance. He could see Catarella waving his arms to get the driver to move it. But the driver, who was Swedish, pretended not to understand, all that vaunted Nordic civility be damned.
Montalbano likewise pretended nothing was happening, got out of his car, and headed straight for the Caff Castiglione, which hadn't changed a whit since its foundation in 1890, where he ate a cannolo just to sweeten his morning. By the time he got back to the station, the truck was gone.
"Any news?" he asked Catarella upon entering.
"Da nooz is cummin 'ard an' fass, Chief! 'Ere was a truck parked ousside 'ere till jess a coupla minnits ago, an' 'ey wannit a change the sign 'at says 'Vigˆta Police' t' say 'Dance Hall.'"
Montalbano said nothing and headed for his office, with Catarella following behind.
"Chief, ya know I tink I know why 'ere's no more fights or killin's or rabberies in town."
"And why's that?"
"Cuz in my 'pinion e'en the crooks've stopped crookin' cuz 'ey're all busy watchin' the crew shootin' the film in town. E'en a big-time dealer like Tot˜ Savatteri, I seen 'im all slicked up an' fancy, drivin' a carritch onna set."
The carriage was probably stuffed full of drugs, thought Montalbano, but he didn't want to burst Catarella's bubble.
After lolling about the office for some three hours, the inspector decided it was time to go eat.
The film crew had naturally also invaded Enzo's trattoria, and what irked Montalbano most was the tremendous, deafening chaos the combination of Swedes and Italians managed to make while eating. Which was intolerable to him, as silence was normally the condiment to his meals.
And so he made a deal with Enzo that his table should always be set in the little room adjacent to the main room. There were few other tables there, and Montalbano made him promise that nobody from the crews, either Italian or Swedish, would be allowed, for any reason, to set foot in that room.
Despite all the bother, his appetite luckily wasn't lacking, and he chowed down seriously on antipasti, spaghetti with fresh tuna sauce, and a platter of mullet. After which he went back outside.
Luckily there was no sign of any filming activity on the jetty. And so he was able to have a pleasant stroll, tranquil and undisturbed. And quiet, above all. Sitting down on the flat rock, he realized that, if things continued along their present course, the best solution might be to take a few vacation days and go see Livia in Boccadasse.
The idea that he would have to meet strangers that evening, and even put on a good face and make conversation with people he found utterly insufferable, made him feel so agitated that he made a sudden decision.
When he got back to the station, he summoned Fazio.
"Listen, I'm going home. If you should need me for anything, just call."
Once he got home he decided that the best thing to do would be to lie down for a spell, and so he undressed and lay down in bed, hoping to doze for half an hour or so.
To his great surprise, when he woke up it was past seven. And so he dashed into the bathroom, changed his shirt, took the good suit out of the armoire, got into it, put on a tie, and looked at himself in the mirror.
Adelina was absolutely right. He looked just like a black seagull.
Town hall was a sea of lights. A number of burning torches had been placed across the faade, and two floodlights lit up the entire building. The Italian and Swedish flags were flying side by side on the balcony. The meeting celebrating the sistering of Vigˆta with Kalmar would be held in the conference hall. While waiting, the guests dallied in the great anteroom, where the tables that would serve the buffet after the ceremony were already laid out with white tablecloths and set.
Montalbano got there a little late, and by that time the anteroom was already full of people. As soon as she saw him come in, Ingrid rushed up to him and, taking his arm, led him to a giant about six-foot-six, a sort of blond bear-if any had ever existed-who was introduced to him as the director of the TV movie.
Ingrid then immediately presented him to two of the three Swedish actresses, adding that the third one had suffered a slight malaise and would therefore not be attending the ceremony.
It took him one look around to ascertain that Mim“ Augello wasn't present, either. Which was very odd. Might he be suffering from the same malaise as the Swedish actress?
Then some people started saying that the guests should move into the council chamber and take their assigned places. And that was how Montalbano found himself sitting in the front row between the town priest and the commander of the Harbor Office. Also in the front row were a carabinieri lieutenant, but he'd been diplomatically seated four places down from the inspector.
Trans: Change OK? or delete "finding" himself," so it reads: "Montalbano ruled up sitting in the front row"?
The wall behind the high-backed chairs of the mayor and his council was entirely covered with a large nineteenth-century tapestry depicting Vigˆta and its port.
At a certain point, from the anteroom came the sound of a sort of light waltz that nobody had ever heard before. The mayor of Vigˆta, Signor Pillitteri, gestured for everyone to stand, and they all obeyed. After the waltz ended, they were all about to sit back down when the national anthem began, and everyone rose again. As they were finally settling in, however, everyone noticed that the four Swedes present were still standing.
