Game of Mirrors by Andrea Camilleri Page B

things.
    In fact, his body started to act the way the Garibaldini were said to have acted when they sprang to the attack before the general had ever given the order.
    His hands, for example, independently of his will, descended as far as the young woman’s posterior globes.
    She then took him by the hand and, staggering slightly, led him into the bedroom.
    She turned on the light. The window was open.
    In a flash she’d taken off her little dress. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and had on a purely hypothetical pair of panties.
    She lay down on the bed and opened her arms toward Montalbano, smiling.
    At this point Montalbano realized he was utterly lost.
    His right foot made one step towards the bed, despite the fact that his brain was ordering him with all its authority to stay put and not move.
    The left foot followed its colleague with equal enthusiasm.
    Only divine intervention could save him now from the abyss into which he was about to plummet.
    “Come on! What are you waiting for?”
    The immediate effect of her voice was to induce the inspector to leap forward, in that both his feet responded simultaneously to the invitation.
    Probably only Saint Anthony could have resisted.
    And Saint Anthony, heeding the call, promptly intervened.
    Montalbano’s cell phone, which he’d transferred from his jacket to his trouser pocket, started to ring.
    The return to reality was so violent that the inspector gave a sort of cry of pain.
    It was Fazio.
    “We caught ’em and are bringing ’em in to thestation,” he said. “Now you can pick up where you left off, if you want.”
    Was there a note of sarcasm in his last statement?
    “No, I’ll be right over,” said Montalbano.
    Then, turning to Liliana: “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
    “Are you crazy? Do you really mean that?”
    Liliana had sat up and was glaring at him so intensely that if he’d kept still for another second he would have caught fire.
    He didn’t answer, but merely ran and grabbed his jacket, jumped down from the veranda, bounded across the beach to his house, got in the car, started it up, and drove off.
         
    It took him little more than a quarter of the time it usually took him to go from his house to the station, but he wasn’t sure whether he was driving so fast because he wanted to escape Liliana or because he was so anxious to interrogate the two suspects.
    While waiting for him, Fazio paced back and forth in the station parking lot, which was practically deserted.
    The inspector gave him a questioning look.
    “It’s too hot inside,” Fazio explained.
    “So where are they?”
    “We put them in a holding cell. I sent Gallo home to bed.”
    “You did the right thing. Did they give you any trouble?”
    “The usual sort of stuff.”
    “Where’d you nab them?”
    “Right outside the bedroom window. They’d climbed over the gate.”
    Montalbano marveled.
    “Right outside the window? How come I didn’t hear anything?”
    Fazio answered a bit awkwardly.
    “Well, we made some noise, Chief, but you were . . . I think your thoughts were elsewhere at that moment.”
    Good thing there wasn’t much light in the parking lot, or Fazio would have noticed that the inspector was blushing.
    They went inside, to Montalbano’s office. Right in the middle of his desk, in full view, was a brand new video camera.
    “They filmed you with this,” said Fazio. “If you want to see yourself . . . it’s got a built-in monitor.”
    Montalbano’s blood froze. Did he really have to see himself playing the star of a tacky porno flick?
The Inspector and the Deep-Throat Femme Fatale
 . . .
Wet Investigations
 . . . He felt too out of breath to say yes.
    So he just nodded assent, as his legs were giving out from under him, and he collapsed in a chair.
    Fazio, pretending not to notice his discomfort, came up to him and set the video cam down in front of him.
    “You ready?”
    “Y . . . es.”
    Fazio pushed a button.
    The filming started