Free A Voice in the Night by Andrea Camilleri Page B

because Fazio moved like a cat.
    Barely five minutes had gone by when Fazio reappeared.
    ‘They were here, but they’re gone.’
    ‘How could you tell they were here?’
    ‘They left all the doors of the cupboard open, as well as the desk drawers. They were looking for the computer. Good thing we were able to get it first.’
    *
    When he got home he showered to wash away the powdery detergent that had entered through his shirt collar and sifted down over his shoulders and chest. It took a good while
because upon coming into contact with the water, the detergent bubbled up worse than soap.
    When he got into bed he smelled like fresh laundry. But he was unable to fall asleep.
    A question kept spinning insistently in his head: why did Borsellino have a recorder like that in his jacket pocket?
    Of course he didn’t always keep it there. He must have been in the habit of putting it in his pocket after using it.
    But what did he do with it? Record music?
    No, he didn’t seem like the type who would listen to Chopin or Brahms.
    He didn’t seem like the type for opera, either. Or even pop songs.
    Therefore it was clear that, now and then, he must have recorded what was said in his office.
    For what purpose?
    He probably turned on the recorder when he had to reprimand or actually sack an employee. That way, if there was a dispute afterwards, he could always show what had actually happened.
    Satisfied with the explanation he’d come up with, Montalbano fell asleep.
    *
    Early in the morning, he had a dream.
    And he remembered it because he woke up right in the middle, and it was therefore still fresh in his memory.
    In the dream he’d been watching part of an American movie he’d seen a long time before. It was called
The Invincibles
. No, he was wrong. The film was called
The
Untouchables
.
    It was about the war a special police unit was waging against the famous Al Capone. And there was a scene that he’d really liked a lot, the one where they arrest Al Capone’s
accountant on an enormous staircase at the railway station.
    It was very important to nab the mysterious accountant because from his records they could prove that the boss was dodging his taxes.
    The funny thing about the dream was that in that scene, he, Montalbano, was the top cop, and Fazio was his assistant.
    What happens in the film is that, just as the two policemen are taking aim at the accountant’s bodyguard, a pram with a child inside slips away from the woman who is pushing it and starts
tumbling down the stairs. The image was clearly a homage to the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
    Since, in the dream, Montalbano wasn’t paying homage to anyone, there was no pram, but in its place there was a tub of detergent not with a baby inside, but with Borsellino the manager in
swaddling clothes, bonnet, and glasses, crying desperately and calling for help on his mobile.
    Fazio tried to stop the detergent pram but was unable, and the detergent tub with Borsellino inside ended up squashed under a train pulling into the station.
    Meanwhile the accountant’s bodyguards were throwing tins of tomatoes at Montalbano. One of them hit him in the forehead and cracked open. Fazio, seeing all that red streaming from his
head, was scared to death.
    ‘Inspector, you’re wounded!’
    ‘No! It’s just tomatoes! Have you forgotten we’re in a film?’
    A royal shambles, in short.
    Then he remembered that before going out on his night raid with Fazio, he’d wolfed down a hefty plate of that damn octopus.
    That explained the whole bloody jumble of his dream. He’d had trouble digesting.
    *
    He woke up only because he’d set the alarm clock. He felt completely muddle-headed. He hadn’t slept even three hours. Just to be safe, the first thing he did was to
take the rest of the octopus still in the fridge and put it outside, on the veranda. The cats could feast on it.
    Then he had a very long shower, more to wake himself up than to wash. And he only