Game of Mirrors by Andrea Camilleri Page A

couldn’t go on this way.
    “Listen,” said Montalbano, “I think all the mosquitoes in the province are gathering here. The light is too bright. I should go and get another light bulb from my house, or else replace this one with something from your dining room.”
    “Just turn it off,” Liliana said with irritation.
    Montalbano obeyed. As a result, they were plunged into total darkness, so that they barely knew where their mouths were anymore. The inspector felt like laughing.
    How was Liliana going to remedy the situation, which was threatening to turn into a farce?
    “The only solution is to move everything into the dining room,” she finally suggested, reluctantly.
    Apparently the dining room was not the preferred battlefield for her war plans.
    And so they started going back and forth, carrying bottles, dishes, glasses, silverware, tablecloth, and napkins.
    On his last journey out to the veranda, Montalbano noticed that the two fishermen were pulling their boat ashore. Maybe they’d figured they wouldn’t catch any more fish that evening.

9
    Inside the house, however, the heat was almost unbearable. They finished the antipasti with the help of some ice-cold white wine, which went down like a dream.
    The wine gave Liliana the strength to make an attempt to end the stalemate.
    “It pains me just to look at you,” she said at one point, smiling. “How can you stand it? Take off your jacket and unbutton your shirt, or you’re going to melt like a ball of ice cream.”
    It wasn’t true. The inspector would hardly have broken a sweat even at the equator, but he concurred.
    “You’re right. Thanks,” he said.
    He remained in shirtsleeves with his collar unbuttoned. And what was she going to do now? Start some sort of game of strip poker?
    Since she wasn’t doing anything, he decided to provoke her.
    “And what about you?”
    “I can still hold out as I am.”
    She was saving her secret moves for later, when the atmosphere would be more conducive.
    She got up from the table and brought back a platter of pasta in salmon sauce.
    Montalbano’s heart gave a flutter. If the pasta was overcooked, he would be unable to swallow it. Instead, to his relief, he immediately found that, while not superb, the pasta was at least edible.
    And it helped them to polish off a second bottle of wine.
    Eating the pasta hadn’t been easy, however, since every so often, as he was bringing a forkful to his mouth, Liliana would suddenly grab his hand, bring it to her lips, and kiss the back of it.
    When they were done, Montalbano helped her bring the empty plates and silverware into the kitchen.
    For the second course, she’d prepared two slices of beef in a hot sauce that he’d never tasted before.
    The spicy sauce called for more wine. Montalbano couldn’t tell whether Liliana was beginning to feel its effects or was just pretending.
    First came the giggles.
    “Your moustache. . . . heeheehee! . . . Look at this little crumb . . . heeheehee!”
    Then she dropped her fork and the inspector bent down to pick it up.
    As he was crouching, she put her naked foot on his back, between the shoulder blades.
    “I dub thee knight of my . . .”
    Montalbano never found out what sort of honor she was bestowing on him because she started to fall out of her chair and didn’t finish her sentence.
    But she pulled herself quickly back up, announcing that she couldn’t stand the heat any longer and had to change her clothes because her sweat-dampened little dress was bothering her.
    “I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said, heading for the bedroom door.
    But after taking three steps, she turned around, approached Montalbano, who in the meantime had stood up out of politeness, wrapped her arms around his waist, put her mouth on his, and pressed it there, opening her lips ever so slowly.
    The kiss was a long one.
    To say that Montalbano went along with it only out of his sense of duty as a policeman would have been stretching