Treasure Hunt Read online

  Montalbano put them in his jacket pocket. Those photos were more than enough to screw Arturo. He could leave now.

  He looked at his watch. Ten-twenty-five. He realized that, assuming Ingrid’s and Arturo’s dinner ended at ten-thirty sharp, the kid would still take at least fifteen minutes to get home.

  He went downstairs, into the kitchen, and opened the door. Five broad steps led down to the cellar.

  A large room with only four old barrels and a great many dust-covered wall shelves that had once served to hold bottles of wine. And there was a door, which he opened.

  And here everything changed. In the middle of the room there was a proper operating table, all covered with blood, with a small table on wheels beside it. On this were a spoon, an awl, several rolls of adhesive bandage, two large rolls of the same packaging tape, a razor, a glass of water with something bloody inside it, probably Ninetta’s eye. In one corner were a pair of shoes and some woman’s clothing. The girl’s. In another corner, a plastic garbage can. But it was full of blood. The blood Arturo had drained from her body before painting her up.

  And near the operating table, another small table with a video screen and a disc player. By some miracle the inspector managed to make it work. On the screen appeared the images of Gregorio Palmisano’s inflatable doll that had been broadcast on TeleVigàta. Apparently Arturo had wanted the recording ready at hand, first for practicing on his grandfather’s doll, and then to work on Ninetta’s body.

  But there was another door, and Montalbano opened it. This third room was smaller than the other two. Here, too, the window was walled up from the inside. On two small tables sat at least four computers and other electronic equipment whose exact purpose wasn’t clear to the inspector. What was certain, however, was that it was with this setup that Arturo had downloaded and printed all the still shots with which he had papered the walls of the wooden shack.

  There was nothing else to see.

  He turned around to leave, and in the beam of the flashlight saw Arturo standing in the doorway with a pistol in his hand.

  Montalbano felt paralyzed. He realized he was trapped, unable to react in the slightest way, since Arturo could empty his whole magazine into him without anyone outside hearing anything.

  But what most struck the inspector, much more than the gun pointed at him, was Arturo’s attitude. The kid didn’t seem the least bit scared, nervous, or worried. At the most, you could say he looked a little annoyed.

  He turned on the light and said:

  “Please sit down.”

  Montalbano sat down in the first chair within reach. Arturo grabbed another.

  “How are you doing?” the youth asked.

  “Not too bad,” said the inspector.

  The guy was truly a dangerous psychopath. What would he do next, offer him a cup of tea?

  “It was you who told Ingrid to invite me out to dinner, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no reason to lie to him.

  “I’m very intelligent, you know. I caught on after a while and was able to get rid of her.”

  Montalbano became alarmed.

  “What do you mean, ‘get rid of her’?”

  Harry Potter flashed a knowing smile, like a sly child. That smile made Montalbano’s blood run cold. Want to bet the guy quite sincerely considered the murder and butchery of Ninetta’s body just a game? A boyish prank? Want to bet that his form of homicidal madness was a kind of unconscious infantile cruelty? Like cutting off the tails of lizards?

  “Don’t worry,” said Arturo, using the familiar form of address. “She’s back at home, safe and sound. While we were in the car, she tried twice to call out on her cell phone, but didn’t get through. Maybe she was trying to warn you.”

  “So, what do we do now?” Montalbano asked.

  “I’m thinking it over. Meanwhile, let’s chat a little, what do you say?”

  “Why not?”

  “How did you figure out I was your challenger in the treasure hunt?”

  “I thought back on the things you said and wrote to me. You made one slip of the tongue and two omissions. Three mistakes. Too many.”

  Upon hearing this reply, Arturo’s face was transformed. His mouth twisted up, his eyes frowned, a deep furrow appeared on his brow. He stood up and started stamping his feet.

  “No! No! No! I don’t make mistakes! You are a lot less intelligent than me! At the most, you might be a little more shrewd! Damn you!”

  Lightning fast, he struck him square in the face with the gun.

  Montalbano’s nose started bleeding.

  “Can I take out my handkerchief?”

  “No!”

  So Montalbano bent his head back as far as it would go, hoping the bleeding would stop promptly. He was more than ever convinced that murdering Ninetta had dealt the final blow to the kid’s already damaged brain.

  Until now he’d always been able to hide his madness, but now it was visible in every move he made. After a few minutes, Montalbano was able to speak again.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  He was pouting, the boy. Just like a child.

  “Come on, just one.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Did you kidnap Ninetta because you already knew her, or because she looked like that girl from the brothel?”

  “I wanted the girl from the brothel. But I just couldn’t find her. And so I stole an SUV and started looking for someone who looked like her. Then, when I was passing a bus, I saw a girl that I thought was her. But when I stopped and pretended to ask her for directions, she came forward and I realized she wasn’t the girl I was looking for, but the resemblance was stunning. And so I grabbed her.”

  “Can I ask you two more questions?”

  “And then that’s all?”

  “And then that’s all.”

  “Swear it.”

  “I swear it. Where did you find the inflatable doll?”

  “Here. In the attic. It was my grandfather’s.”

  He’d been right on the money.

  “And the lamb’s head, how’d you do it?”

  “That was pretty good, eh?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “I was driving around near Gallotta and I saw an untended flock, so I grabbed a lamb, slit its throat, stuck it in the trunk, brought it here, cut its head off and put it in an old cookie tin that was in the attic. And now no more questions.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  The youth began to stare at him thoughtfully, tapping the barrel of the gun lightly against his lips. Then he made up his mind.

  “Let’s go in the other room. You first.”

  Montalbano would never manage to pull out his revolver in time; the kid would have all the time in the world to shoot first. He stood up and went into the other room.

  “Stop in front of the bed.”

  That was the last thing he heard but one. The very last thing was the powerful crash of the pistol butt against his head, which knocked him out.

  He opened his eyes. The back of his head hurt like hell. He was lying on the operating table, stripped down to his underpants, mouth, wrists, and ankles immobilized with duct tape. His clothes lay on top of Ninetta’s. The door of the room was closed. He realized that his only hope for saving his skin was to keep the kid talking. But how could he do that with his mouth taped shut? He couldn’t. He was finished. And at that moment, as though projecting himself out of his body, he saw himself there, in his underpants, socks, and shoes, lying on an operating table, and he found himself so ridiculous that he started laughing.

  He was laughing because his brain refused to accept what was happening to him. It was the kind of thing you might see in a horror film or some fantasy movie, not in real life.

  He heard a key turn, and the door opened.

  Arturo had returned with a chain saw, a hammer, and a chisel. What the fuck was the kid thinking? Maybe he
wanted to play surgeon. He extracted from his pocket one of those steel boxes for syringes and set it down on one of the small tables, next to his pistol.

  “I’ll explain,” he said. “I want to have a good look at your brain. I want to examine it up close, live. Understand? And so I have to remove the top of your skull. But I’ll put you to sleep first.”

  Montalbano, drenched in sweat, tried to control the panic that was taking hold of him. He howled.

  “Did you want to say something?”

  Montalbano nodded yes, shaking his head up and down desperately. The kid tore off the tape, causing him pain.

  “What is it?”

  “I wanted to suggest another game. A fantastic game. Something that’ll require your full intelligence.”

  For a second, Arturo’s eyes sparkled with contentment.

  “Really?!”

  “Yes, you’ll see.”

  Then suddenly the kid’s eyes darkened.

  “I don’t believe you. Anyway, we don’t need to play another game to prove that I can beat you every time.”

  And he taped the inspector’s mouth back up.

  Montalbano’s only hope was that the anesthesia would actually work.

  Arturo grabbed the metal box, opened it, took out a syringe, and with his other hand he pulled out a little phial, filled the syringe, and then checked it against the light for air bubbles.

  Montalbano closed his eyes.

  And he thought he’d fallen asleep in the twinkling of an eye, because it wasn’t possible that what he was hearing was the cool, calm voice of Fazio.

  “Freeze right there, little asshole. Make the slightest move and I’ll kill you.”

  He opened his eyes. It was true!

  Fazio had his gun trained on Arturo, who looked like he’d turned into a statue. Behind Fazio were Gallo and Galluzzo, who in the space of ten seconds jumped on the kid, slammed him to the ground, and handcuffed him.

  “Why? Why?” Arturo wailed, his voice on the verge of tears. “We were just playing. . . .”

  Without understanding why, Montalbano felt a heartbreaking sorrow.

  Fazio, meanwhile, had come up to him and was delicately removing the tape from his mouth. The first thing the inspector asked was:

  “Who alerted you?”

  “Signora Ingrid. She told me you’d asked her to keep the kid away from his house for a while, but she got scared that it was maybe too early. And so I called Gallo and Galluzzo and came straight here. You told me yourself you were going to do a little check.”

  “Call Seminara at once. Then pass me the cell phone so I can tell Ingrid everything’s all right.”

  When he got home to Marinella it was almost three in the morning. He was so famished he could have eaten a live elephant. Inside the oven he found a large casserole of pasta ’ncasciata and eight arancini, each one bigger than a real orange. As he headed for the bathroom to take a shower, he started singing out loud. As off-key as a church bell. And when he was done eating, he very nearly had to drag himself to the telephone to call Livia, though the sun was already rising, and tell her that he’d be flying to Genoa that very day.

  Author’s Note

  Everything in this novel, names and surnames, situations and events, is only the fruit of my imagination. If anyone should recognize himself in one of my characters, it means he has more imagination than I.

  Notes

  municipal cop: That is, what Italians call a vigile urbano, who is under a different jurisdiction from the commissariato, which Montalbano is chief of, and which handles criminal investigations.

  having a few cats to comb: A literal translation of the Sicilian expression, which means to have tedious, difficult, and useless chores to attend to.

  spaghetti alle vongole veraci (and truly veraci): Vongole of course are clams, but the dish is generally served with either one of two species of small clams: telline, which are the smaller variety, with smooth, shiny shells; and the vongole veraci, the “real” vongole, which are larger, with striated shells, and more savory and prized.

  “pewters”: Catarella’s word for “computers.”

  Settimana Enigmistica: An immensely popular Italian weekly of puzzles including rebuses, acrostics, crossword puzzles, and riddles, created in 1932.

  cuddriruni: A kind of Sicilian focaccia.

  cacio all’argintera: Caciocavallo cheese sliced fine and sautéed in olive oil with garlic, oregano, vinegar, and a pinch of sugar and salt.

  Ex ore tuo te judico: By thine own mouth will I judge thee (Luke 19:22).

  arancini: Traditional Sicilian fried rice balls. Literally “little oranges,” arancini are normally considerably smaller than the ones Adelina has made for Montalbano.

  Notes by Stephen Sartarelli