Treasure Hunt Page 18

  Gallo looked at him in astonishment and was off like a rocket.

  Montalbano closed his eyes and put himself in God’s hands.

  “Now turn off the siren and try to make as little noise as possible,” Montalbano said as soon as they turned onto the narrow dirt path between the trees that led to the tavern.

  The little house’s doors and windows were still closed. So much the better. The inspector didn’t want any curious busybodies following after them.

  “Now what?”

  “Now pay attention. Keep going straight, but you’ll soon find yourself on a treacherous trail that only four-by-fours can handle. Think you can manage it?”

  By way of reply, Gallo grinned and started driving without making the slightest noise. He really was good.

  At moments the inspector was afraid the car would flip over or fall onto its side with its wheels in the air, but Gallo was able to hold the road. When they reached the shore of the lake, however, he was drenched in sweat.

  “Now what?”

  “I’m getting out to smoke a cigarette, you can do whatever you like.”

  He didn’t really feel like smoking a cigarette, it was just an excuse to delay the moment of truth a little longer. Or perhaps to get his mind ready for what he was about to see—or, more precisely, what he would have to endure, if what he’d imagined turned out to be right.

  Because what he’d imagined was horror. Sheer horror.

  A horror that was sure to seem all the more unbearable on that perfect morning, with the air so crisp it made the colors sharp as knives, and the lake water really did look like a piece of the sky that had fallen to earth. All perfectly still. Not a blade of grass moving. Total silence. No birds singing or dogs barking in the distance. A calm before a storm would have caused less anguish.

  Usually he smoked his cigarettes three-quarters down, but this time he didn’t toss it to the ground until it was burning his fingers. And he wasted still more time carefully snuffing it out with his heel.

  He got back into the car. Gallo had remained inside, slightly spooked by the inspector’s behavior.

  “See that little house?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Think you could make it up there?”

  “Piece of cake.”

  The inspector simply didn’t feel like going up that little stretch of inclined road on foot. His legs were already too wobbly.

  “Now what?” asked Gallo, pulling up right in front of the missing door.

  Jeez, what a pain in the ass with this Now what crap!

  “Now we go inside. I’ll go first and you follow.”

  “Isn’t it better if I go first?”

  “Why?”

  “What if there’s someone who—”

  “There’s nobody. If only there were somebody to start shooting at us!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Chief?” Gallo asked, stunned.

  “It means I would prefer that.”

  And he opened the door to step out. But Gallo held him back, putting one hand on his arm.

  “What’s in there, Chief?”

  “If it’s what I think, it’s something so horrific that it’ll haunt your dreams for the rest of your life. If you want, you can stay in the car.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Gallo, getting out.

  Despite the fact that he’d prepared himself as best he could, gritting his teeth as he climbed the unsteady wooden stairs, what he saw stopped him dead in his tracks and knocked the wind out of him.

  Coming up behind him, Gallo, as soon as he saw the thing lying on the floor in the middle of the room, froze for a second or two, then let out a cry of fear, so shrill it sounded like a woman’s, turned around, put one foot on the staircase, stumbled down to the third step, fell to the ground, got up, ran out of the house, and started throwing up his soul, letting out a continuous wail like a wild animal.

  A few minutes later, Montalbano came out of the house. He’d succeeded in regaining his self-control and forcing his eyes to look at the thing.

  My next task truly makes me tremble:

  to change real to real that it resemble.

  Because the nude body was indeed Ninetta’s, there was no doubt about that. But her body had been changed into that of an inflatable doll, exactly like the other two.

  The killer had gouged out one of her eyes, torn out clumps of hair, and punctured the body repeatedly, covering the holes with adhesive bandages. . . .

  But the most horrifying thing was that he’d painted her lips red with lipstick, redrawn her eyebrows with eyebrow pencil, spread a bit of rouge over her cheekbones . . . And to lend color to her body he had smeared makeup foundation all over it. Death had stamped a sort of grimace on Ninetta’s face, leaving the teeth bared. A terrifying mask, precisely because it was at once real and fake.

  So he really must have worked very hard to “enrich” the hunt and its treasure, the grand prize. But the inspector wasn’t at all happy about winning the challenge. On the contrary, he would rather have lost it a million times over.

  Coming out of the house, he wondered for a moment whether he should go over to the woods where Fazio said a group of young foreigners had pitched camp. It must have been a girl from their group who’d found the corpse and called the police. But then he realized he wouldn’t find anyone there; they must surely all have run away.

  He went and sat down on a rock beside Gallo, who for his part was sitting on the ground, face buried in his hands.

  “Why?” he asked the inspector almost voicelessly.

  “Is there a reason for madness?”

  “Look, I’m not going back in there.”

  “You don’t have to. We’re going to get back in the car now and call Fazio. He knows this place. All he has to do is inform Inspector Seminara that we’ve found Ninetta’s body.”

  When they’d done this, Gallo’s inevitable question came.

  “Now what?”

  “Let’s get out of here. We’ll go back to the lake.”

  This time Gallo drove so poorly that the car very nearly rolled down the slope and crashed.

  “Now what?”

  “Feel up to standing guard here?”

  “Sure. What about you?”

  “I’d rather not be here when they arrive. Just tell Seminara to ring me whenever he wants.”

  He got out of the car and headed towards the dirt road. Better that path, which looked like some infernal landscape out of Doré, than stay a second longer back there, amidst all that beauty infected with violence, cruelty, and madness.

  He reached the tavern about half an hour later, dead tired from the walk. Luckily the place was open and the woman sitting in her usual chair, peeling potatoes.

  “Wha’ c’n I git for you?”

  “Half a liter.”

  At the bar she put a bottle with the liquid volume measured down to the milliliter in front of him, along with a glass.

  “Do you know whether there are any taxis in Gallotta?”

  “No sir, but my son’s got a car.”

  “Is he here?”

  “No sir, in Gallotta.”

  “Could you call him and ask if he could drive me to Vigàta?”

  “Yessir.”

  He grabbed a chair, went and sat outside, filled his glass, and set the bottle down on the ground.

  It was truly a glorious morning. The air was clean and fine, and everything gleamed as if it had just been polished. It looked like the first day of creation. But perhaps that was why it was so unbearable to him that he had to drown it in wine. Beautiful forms often make horror more salient.

  “He’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” said the old woman.

  There was only one good side to what had happened—if you really could call it good. And that was that he wouldn’t have to be the one to tell the poor Bonmaritos that their daughter had been murdered.

  Mimì came in around noon, but he already knew about the discovery of the body because Fazio had phon
ed him.

  “Did you find the madam?”

  “Yes. She’s at home, on house arrest. She lives in Campobello.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She only gave me general sort of information. I don’t know if it’s because she’s got a bad memory for faces or just afraid to talk. All she said was that the guy was young, dark, rather tall, and well dressed.”

  “If we showed him to her, would she recognize him?”

  “She said maybe yes. But I wouldn’t trust her. She might see him and recognize him and then turn around and tell us it’s not him.”

  “So you think it’s best to forget about her?”

  “I’d say so.”

  Gallo got back past one.

  “Jesus, what a morning, Chief! First it was Prosecutor Tommaseo, who got it in his head to come in his own car. At the start of the dirt road leading to the lake, he drove into a ditch and we had to pull him out with chains; then the ambulance couldn’t make it either, and they had to carry the body on foot all the way to the tavern. . . .”

  “Did Pasquano come?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that the girl hadn’t been killed there. Nothing else.”

  There was no need for all of Dr. Pasquano’s knowledge to figure that out.

  17

  He got a ride home to Marinella. Then he unplugged the phone and went to bed. An hour later, he woke up, took a long shower, and went and sat down on the veranda.

  And, like the previous evening, he spread out across the table the murderer’s letters and the note from Arturo.

  Words, words, words, as Mina used to sing in the song.

  What new things could these words tell him that they hadn’t already? It was thanks to his ability to interpret them that he’d suddenly known where to find Ninetta’s body. Nevertheless, he had an obscure feeling that these words could still reveal a number of things to him. He had to steel his patience and keep reading and rereading them, maybe breaking them down, syllable by syllable, paying close attention to periods and commas . . .

  But wouldn’t it be better to ask Arturo to help? The kid was a student of words. Philosophy is made up of words; the boy could grasp the sense, meaning, weight, and texture of every word. Yes, it was the only way.

  Montalbano got up, went inside, sat down by the phone, and was about to pick up the receiver when he froze.

  Arturo.

  A violent flash of light blinded him for a moment, but illuminated his brain. A trickle of sweat rolled down from his head, under his shirt, and gave him a cold shudder. Yes, he was in a cold sweat.

  Arturo.

  He ran back outside, picked up the last message and Arturo’s note and placed them side by side. An obvious discrepancy jumped out at him.

  The insane murderer—he didn’t feel like calling him a “prankster” or “challenger” anymore, so much had things changed—had written:

  Day and night, my work and pleasure

  is all to enrich your hunt for the treasure.

  Whereas in his note Arturo had changed the second line to “make the treasure unique and unrepeatable.”

  Wasn’t the long, horrific, painstaking work done on poor Ninetta’s body better described by Arturo’s words than by those of the killer himself?

  “Unique and unrepeatable” were much more precise, better cut to measure than “enrich your hunt,” which was rather general and could refer to just about any outcome. Whereas those used by the kid fitted so perfectly as to seem the only ones possible.

  But how could Arturo have been in a position to foresee the uniqueness and unrepeatability of that crime?

  There was only one explanation possible, which was that the kid already knew what the killer would do to poor Ninetta’s body. And the only person who could have known this was the killer himself.

  Or an accomplice of his.

  No, wrong. No accomplices. Wasn’t it Arturo himself who told him that the treasure hunt was less a game than a duel, a challenge to the death between two people? That was why he made the slip.

  More importantly, however, instead of dwelling, in his note, on the tears of joy, why hadn’t he mentioned the two lines that were the most incomprehensible of all and had so upset the inspector when he first read them on the rock by the sea?

  My next task truly makes me tremble:

  to change real to real that it resemble.

  An unconscious slip and a willful omission. Willful in order to distract attention away from his main intention: to transform a human body into an inflatable rubber doll.

  A slip and omission that were bigger than a house.

  By this point he was so drenched in sweat that he had to go back inside and take another shower. As the water was washing over his body and refreshing him, he began to review every encounter he’d had with Arturo, trying to remember every word they’d said to each other.

  So, during their first meeting, the kid had said he’d wanted to meet him to understand how his brain functioned during an investigation.

  Wasn’t it possible that Arturo, in challenging him with the treasure hunt, had in reality wanted to assign the investigation a theme? By forcing him down a predetermined path, the kid would know how things would unfold; and if he already knew all the details in advance, wouldn’t that make it easier for him to follow the functioning of the inspector’s brain? And to be doubly sure, the kid had even had the cheek to introduce himself to him and get himself accepted as the inspector’s advisor.

  Extremely dangerous. This was a criminal mind the likes of which he had never encountered before. Arturo had preplanned everything he intended to do, down to the finest details, and then executed it without ever missing a step. So he needed an SUV to take the girl’s body to the tumbledown house by way of that treacherous road? He’d stolen the car he wanted even before he had the victim in his hands. And how skillful and coldly lucid he’d been in kidnapping Ninetta on a busy street, before the eyes of so many witnesses!

  In the inspector’s second meeting with the youth, there were at least two things that didn’t make sense. Or that made all too much sense, depending on your point of view.

  The first was that when he’d asked Arturo how he’d found Via dei Mille, the kid had replied that he’d got a street guide from city hall. Which couldn’t have been true since city hall didn’t have street guides.

  The second thing was that when he’d asked Arturo whether all the photos in the shack were still hanging on the walls, he’d said yes, they were all still there. Whereas in fact not only had Montalbano taken one, but a few others had fallen onto the floor. So the kid hadn’t gone into the house, as he had claimed, because he already knew perfectly well that it was full of those photographs, since he’d put them there himself.

  Then later, he’d been so insistent that Montalbano should go to the house by the lake! What had he said? Ah, yes, that there might be something inside that would prove useful to him.

  And there was another omission, too. He hadn’t asked the inspector how he’d come by the letter that led him to the house. This was the letter that had come in the parcel with the lamb’s head. Why hadn’t Arturo been curious enough to ask?

  Suddenly the water stopped coming down from the tanks. Luckily Montalbano hadn’t had a trace of soap on his body for quite some time. As he was getting dressed again, he had to admit to himself that all he’d been doing so far was just talk, hot air. His line of reasoning made sense, no doubt about it, but it had one flaw: it rested on the wispiest of threads, no more substantial than a spider’s.

  This time his interpretation of what Arturo had or hadn’t said was like a rubber band stretched to the maximum and about to break at any moment.

  If you really thought about it, those same words could be interpreted in the exact opposite way, which would lead to the conclusion that Arturo was not behind the treasure hunt and therefore not the killer.

  No, this time, words were not eno
ugh. He imagined his conversation with Prosecutor Tommaseo.

  “But what does your sense of his guilt rest on?”

  “On a slip of the tongue and two omissions.”

  Tommaseo was sure to send for the men in white coats.

  Proof was what was needed, and the inspector didn’t have so much as a shadow of proof in hand. He suddenly felt disheartened. Wouldn’t it be better just to forget about it all? What was the use, after all? The fact was, Ninetta was already dead and they hadn’t been able to save her. He would talk to Seminara, tell him his suspicions and then let him decide.

  No, he was making a mistake. He was giving up. Hadn’t Arturo convinced him that this was a duel? Well, then, a duel it would be. To the death.

  Anyway, he couldn’t very well let a murderous madman like that run free.

  But what to do?

  All at once he remembered something that Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defense secretary, had said, when the chief of the UN inspectors sent to Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction reported that they hadn’t found a fucking thing. He’d said: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Brilliant.

  And so he resolved to carry on playing the game. But no longer Arturo’s game, the treasure hunt, but a game of his own choosing, which he called the game of truth. And he was sure he would win.

  He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. He dashed into the dining room and dialed Ingrid’s number. He prayed to the Good Lord, or whoever was standing in for him, that he’d find her at home.

  “Hello, who is this?”

  He very nearly had a heart attack. How could this person be answering in perfect Italian?

  “Montalbano here. I’d like to speak with Signora Ingrid, please.”

  “I’ll put her on.”

  A distant murmur of voices, clicking heels drawing near.