The Track of Sand by Andrea Camilleri Page B

something.”
    “Tell me.”
    “You . . . I really like you. I like talking to you, being with you.”
    “Thank you,” said Montalbano, a bit confused and not knowing what else to say.
    She laughed. And in his mind he saw her naked, in the bathtub, throwing her head back and laughing. A cold chill ran down his spine.
    “I don’t think we’re going to be able to spend any time together tomorrow, just the two of us . . .Although, maybe—”
    She broke off as if she had just thought of something. Montalbano waited a bit, then went ahem, ahem, exactly the way they do in British novels.
    She resumed speaking.
    “At any rate, I’ve decided to stay another three or four days in Montelusa. I think I already mentioned that to you. I hope we’ll have a chance to meet. See you tomorrow, Salvo.”

    He took a shower and went out on the veranda to eat.Adelina had made a salad of baby octopus big enough for four and some giant prawns to be dressed only with olive oil, lemon, salt, and black pepper.
    He ate and drank, managing only to think of idiocies.
    Then he got up and phoned Livia.
    “Why didn’t you call me yesterday?” was the first thing she said.
    How could he tell her he got drunk with Ingrid and it had completely slipped his mind?
    “There was no way.”
    “Why not?”
    “I was busy.”
    “With whom?”
    Jeez, what a pain in the ass!
    “What do you mean, with whom? With my men.”
    “What were you doing?”
    His balls were definitively broken.
    “We were having a competition.”
    “A competition?!”
    “Yes, to see who could say the stupidest shit imaginable.”
    “And you won, of course. You have no rivals in that field!”
    And thus began the usual relaxing nightly squabble.

6
    After the phone call, he no longer felt like going to bed. He went back out on the veranda and sat down. He needed to distract himself a little, to think about something that had nothing to do with either Livia or the horse case.
    The night was calm but quite dark. He could barely see the slightly lighter line of the sea. Out on the water, directly in front of the veranda, was a jacklamp that in the darkness looked closer than it really was.
    At once a taste of lightly fried sole came back to him, between the tongue and palate. He swallowed emptily.
    He was ten years old when his uncle took him night-fishing with a jacklamp for the first and last time, after having pleaded with his wife for an entire evening.
    “An’ what if the boy falls inna sea?”
    “Whas got inna you’ head? If ’e falls inna sea, we fish ’im back out.There’s two of us, me ’n’ Ciccino, c’mon!”
    “An’ what if ’e’s cold?”
    “Gimme a sweater. If ’e’s cold, I’ll make ’im put it on.”
    “An’ what if ’e feels sleepy?”
    “He can sleep onna bottom o’ the boat.”
    “An’ you, Salvuzzo, you wanna go?”
    “Well . . .”
    He wanted nothing more, every time his uncle went out to fish. At last his aunt consented, after giving him a thousand warnings.
    That night, he remembered, was exactly like this one. Moonless.You could see all the lights along the coast.
    At a certain point, Ciccino, the sixty-year-old seaman who was rowing the boat, had said:
    “Turn it on.”
    And his uncle had turned on the jacklamp. A sort of pale blue light, very powerful.
    It gave him the impression that the sandy sea bottom had suddenly risen to the surface of the water, completely illuminated. He saw a school of tiny fish which, dazzled by the light, had suddenly frozen, staring at the jacklamp.
    There were transparent jellyfish, a couple of fish that looked like snakes, and some kind of crab crawling along . . .
    “You keep leaning out like that, you’ll fall in,” Ciccino said softly.
    Spellbound, he hadn’t even realized he was bending so far out of the boat that his face was about to touch the water. His uncle was standing astern, holding the ten-pointed harpoon, its ten-foot shaft tied to his wrist with another ten feet of