Free Angelica's Smile by Andrea Camilleri Page B

unseen.
    “Just come to my office after you’re finished with Fazio,” Montalbano said in a tone halfway between bureaucratic and indifferent.
    Whereas if Fazio hadn’t been still there in his room, he would have started jumping for joy.

    How was he going to make the time pass while Angelica was filing her report with Fazio?
    The question called to mind an episode when he was deputy inspector. The thought of it slightly lessened the agitation that had come over him and was making him tingle inside.
    One night he was sent on a stakeout with two other men in a dark alley in a village he didn’t know, some thirty-odd houses lost in the mountains.
    They were hoping to catch a fugitive.
    They waited all night, and then the sun rose.
    There was nothing more for them to do. The operation had been a bust.
    And so he went with his men to have some coffee and noticed, in the distance, a little shop with newspapers on display.
    He walked over to it, but when he reached that strange sort of kiosk, he noticed that the newspapers on display were old, dating back to 1940.
    There was even a copy of
Il Popolo d’Italia
, the preeminent Fascist newspaper, with Mussolini’s speech declaring war on the front page.
    Puzzled and curious, he went into the shop.
    On the dust-covered shelves inside there were bars of soap, tubes of toothpaste, razor blades, boxes of brilliantine, all from the same period as the newspapers.
    Behind the counter was a very thin man of about seventy, with a goatee and thick glasses.
    “I’d like some toothpaste, please,” said Montalbano.
    The old man handed him a tube.
    “You’d better try it first,” he advised. “It might not be good anymore.”
    Montalbano unscrewed the cap, squeezed it, and instead of the usual little worm of paste, what came out was a sort of pink dust.
    “It’s all dried up,” the old man said disconsolately.
    But Montalbano’s eyes lit up with a flash of amusement.
    “Let’s try another,” he said, curious to get to the bottom of this mystery.
    The second tube likewise contained only dust.
    “Forgive me for asking,” said Montalbano, “but can you tell me what you get out of keeping a shop like this?”
    “What I get, sir? I get to pass the time with outsiders like you.”
    And making the time pass meant surviving.
    Like the time he competed with a lizard in resisting the sun . . .

    There was a knock at the door.
    “Come in.”
    It was Fazio and Angelica.
    “It didn’t take long because the young lady was very thorough. She brought us a very detailed list of everything that was stolen,” said Fazio.
    “So we can go now?” Montalbano asked Angelica.
    “The sooner the better,” she replied, smiling.

    “Do you have a car?”
    “Have you forgotten they stole it?”
    With her walking so close beside him, he was no longer all there in the head.
    “Then we’ll go in mine.”
    “Where are you taking me?”
    “Where I usually go. Da Enzo. Have you ever eaten there?”
    “No. We have an arrangement with a little restaurant behind the bank. It’s only so-so. Is Enzo’s good?”
    “Excellent. Otherwise I wouldn’t go there.”
    “I like good food too. Nothing fancy, just simple, good stuff.”
    A point in her favor.
    Actually the thousand and first point in her favor, considering the first thousand she’d already won just by her presence.
    Enzo, too, was struck by the young woman’s beauty, and he didn’t hide it. He stood there mildly spellbound, looking at her slack-jawed. Then, when he noticed an imperceptible little spot on the tablecloth, he insisted on changing it.
    “What’ll you have?”
    “I’ll have whatever the gentleman is having,” said Angelica.
    She felt her heart invaded bit by bit
    Till burning passion had encompassed it.
    Montalbano began the litany.
    “Seafood antipasto?”
    “Good!”
    “Spaghetti with sea-urchin sauce?”
    “Excellent!”
    “Fried surmullet?”
    “Perfect!”
    “The house white?”
    “All right.”
    Enzo