Treasure Hunt (4 page)

As he was driving to work, his car’s motor made a strange noise and then suddenly stalled, eliciting a deafening chorus of screeching tires, horn blasts, curses, and insults. He managed to start it up again after a brief spell, but he decided the time had come to take the car to the mechanic’s. There were many and sundry things that either didn’t work or had a mind of their own.

The mechanic had a look at the engine, brakes, and electrical system and shook his head in dismay. Exactly like a doctor beside the bed of a terminally ill patient.

“I’m afraid she’s ready to be junked, Inspector.”

The use of that verb set his nerves on edge. Whenever he heard it, whenever he read it, his cojones immediately started to go into a spin. And it wasn’t the only word that had this effect on him. There were others: securitize, contingency, restructuring, as per, precurrent, and dozens more.

Languages long dead invented wonderful words they handed down to us for eternity.

Whereas our modern languages, when they died—which was inevitable, since every tongue on earth was becoming a colony of American English, itself dying a slow death by suicide—what words would they hand down to posterity? Junked? Scam? Keisters? Kickback? Normalcy?

“That’s the furthest thing from my mind,” Montalbano snapped rudely.

Another day of dead calm, as Fazio called it, went by at the station. That evening the inspector had Gallo drive him home. It would be another three days before he got his car back.

After eating the mullet in broth and the caponata Adelina had made for him, he continued sitting outside on the veranda.

He felt torn. He would have liked to leave for Boccadasse the very next day, but perhaps should have done so earlier. Too much time had gone by with nothing happening, and therefore the probability that nothing would continue to happen had lessened greatly.

After smoking two cigarettes, he felt like getting into bed and starting that novel by Simenon,
The President
, which he had bought after going to the garage.

He went inside and locked the French door to the veranda. Picking up the book, which he had left on the table, he realized he’d left the light on in the entrance hall. As he went to turn it off, he noticed a white envelope on the floor, which someone had apparently slipped under the door. A perfectly normal-looking letter envelope.

Was it there when he’d come in and he simply hadn’t noticed it? Or had someone put it there while he was out on the veranda?

Written in block letters on the envelope were the words:
FOR SALVO MONTALBANO
. And, on the upper left:
Treasure Hunt
. He opened it. A half-sheet of paper with a sort of poem:

Three times three

is not thirty-three

and six times six

is not sixty-six.

The figure thus obtained

another number shall ordain.

Add your age to the raffle

and the riddle unravel.

What was this bullshit? Some kind of joke? And why hadn’t they sent it through the mail?

The last thing he felt like doing was solving riddles or playing treasure hunt at one o’clock in the morning.

He slipped the envelope and letter into the pocket of the jacket he normally kept in the entrance and went to bed, bringing the book along.

It was almost nine by the time he got to the office. He’d turned the light out rather late the night before, unable to put the book down. Some ten minutes later Catarella rang him.

“Ah, Chief, Chief! Onna line ’ere’s a woman witta womanly voice raisin’ ’er voice so I dunno what ’er voice is raisin’ cuz she’s raisin’ ’er voice!”

“Did she ask for me?”

“I dunno, Chief.”

He really didn’t feel like having his ears ringing with the voice of a woman who raised her voice when she raised her voice.

“Pass the call to Inspector Augello.”

Less than three minutes later, Mimì came in, looking dead serious and rather upset.

“There’s a totally hysterical woman who says that when she went to take her garbage out, she saw a corpse in the trash bin.”

“Did she say what street it was on?”

“Via Brancati 18.”

“Okay. Grab somebody and go there.”

Mimì hesitated.

“Actually I’d told Beba I would take her and Salvuccio this morning to . . .”

Another irritation. Of course he’d been pleased when Mimì and his wife Beba had decided to name their son after him. But he really couldn’t stand to hear him called Salvuccio.

“I get the picture. I’ll go to Via Brancati myself. But I want you to call Forensics, the prosecutor, and Pasquano right away.”

Gallo simply couldn’t find this goddamned Via Brancati.

They’d been going round and round fruitlessly for the past half hour, and of all the people they asked, not one appeared to have ever heard of the street.

“Let’s go and ask at city hall,” Fazio suggested.

But Gallo’d got it in his thick head that he wanted to find it himself. And there was nothing worse than an agitated Gallo at the wheel. Sure enough he turned the wrong way onto a one-way street at high speed.

“Be careful!”

“But there’s nobody on the street!”

And at that exact moment a car that had just turned the corner appeared suddenly before them.

Montalbano closed his eyes. It was a narrow street, and Gallo swerved wildly away, crashing into the outdoor stall of a fruit and vegetables shop. Tomatoes, oranges, lemons, grapes, chicory, potatoes, escarole, eggplant, and the rest went flying, turning to mush on the street and sidewalk.

The shop owner came out in a rage and started making a scene. The whole thing risked wasting several hours of their time, but Montalbano quickly showed the man his papers and told him to send the bill to the police station. The man agreed at once to do so, obviously seeing a chance to claim triple the damages.

They resumed going round and round to no end.

All at once the inspector remembered the criteria that every zoning office, in every town hall in Italy—all of them, without exception, from the big cities to the smallest towns—used for naming their streets. The most central streets were without fail always named after abstract things, like liberty, republic, and independence; the slightly less central streets, after political figures of the past, like Cavour, Zanardelli, Crispi, and others; the streets just outside of those, after other, more recent political figures, like De Gasperi, Einaudi, and Togliatti. And then, as you got farther and farther from the center, came heroes, military leaders, mathematicians, scientists, and industrialists, until you came to a few dentists. Reserved for last, for the streets on the most remote outskirts, the shabbiest ones, those bordering on the open country, were the names of artists, writers, sculptors, poets, painters, and musicians.

And indeed Via Vitaliano Brancati consisted of four little cottages with chickens running free outside. Which, in a sense, was a fortunate thing.

Because standing around a woman of about forty dressed all in black and sitting on a chair and holding a wet handkerchief to her forehead were a woman of about seventy and two men. Whereas on most other streets there would have been a huge mob they would have had to disperse with billy clubs.

In front of one of the cottages was a lone dumpster. The dead body could only be in there.

“Has anyone other than the signora opened it?”

The elderly woman and the two men shook their heads. Fazio lifted the lid and Montalbano stood on tiptoe to look inside.

The only thing in there was the body.

“Holy fucking shit!” said the inspector.

Then, turning to Fazio:

“Hold it steady for me.”

He wanted to double-check, so flabbergasted had he been by what he’d seen. Fazio grabbed onto the edge with both hands to act as a counterweight. Montalbano hoisted himself up, holding himself in the air with his hands resting on the rim of the dumpster, then lowered himself halfway inside, bending over with his belly resting on the rim. He touched the body, pulled himself back up, then landed back with both feet on the ground.

Fazio shot him an inquiring glance. The woman who’d been sitting had also stood up and came forward with the other two. Montalbano, however, remained silent, dazed and speechless.

“It’s an inflatable doll,” he said at last.

How many of them could there be, in Vigàta?

“So much the better,” said Fazio. “We can leave it right there.”

“No,” said Montalbano, “pull it out.”

Fazio got Gallo to help, and they laid it down on the ground and just stood there staring at it in silence.

All three policemen turned sullen and grave, because the doll was identical in every way to the one that Gregorio Palmisano had kept in his bed. Some of the hair had fallen out, an eye was missing, one of the tits deflated, and the body was covered with many little round and square rubber patches.

At that exact moment Dr. Pasquano arrived, followed by the ambulance for transporting corpses. Seeing the doctor appear, Montalbano realized he would rather be in a forest at that moment, surrounded by wild animals. And indeed, Pasquano, like the asshole he was, started clowning around.

He squatted down beside the doll and started to examine it.

“The body shows no signs of violence,” he said.

“Iss a doll, Doctor,” said the woman who’d discovered it. She was still standing there, not quite knowing what to do.

“Take her away,” said Pasquano. “I’ve got work to do.”

Then he went on:

“She probably died of natural causes.”

“That’s enough, now, Doctor,” said Montalbano.

Pasquano sprang up like a cricket, red in the face.

“So you’re not going to ask me the hour of death, eh?” he blurted out. “Can’t you see you’re no longer able to distinguish between a corpse and a doll? Next time, before inconveniencing me, make sure the dead body’s really a body and not a mannequin! Of all the lamebrained crap . . .”

He got back in his car, cursing, and drove off.

The two stretcher bearers came slowly forward, looking doubtful. They cast a glance at the doll, and one of them scratched his head. The other asked:

“Are we supposed to take this away with us?”

“No, no, you can leave too, thanks,” said the inspector, feeling annihilated.

Naturally, as soon as Pasquano was gone, Forensics arrived with the entire team, a small van and two cars. Out of the first vehicle stepped Vanni Arquà, chief of Forensics, whom the inspector found truly insufferable. And the feeling was quite mutual.