The Safety Net (An Inspector Montalbano Mystery, Band 25) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrea Camilleri, a mega-bestseller in Italy and Germany, is the author of the New York Times bestselling Inspector Montalbano mystery series as well as historical novels that take place in nineteenth-century Sicily. His books have been made into Italian TV shows and translated into thirty-two languages. His thirteenth Montalbano novel, The Potter's Field, won the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger Award and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator and the author of three books of poetry.

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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,"...