Treasure Hunt Page 3

  “Tell me something, Fazio, I’m curious.”

  “Sure, Chief.”

  “Did you get a strange feeling from that apartment?”

  “Don’t remind me, Chief! When I saw that enormous room packed full of crucifixes, pardon my language, but I nearly shat my pants!”

  He would have liked to stand up and hug Fazio. So they were all creeped out and afraid. Except they hadn’t let on. And so his morning cogitations had been for naught.

  At one o’clock he went to Enzo’s to eat. He was extremely hungry, being behind in his eating, having had no time for supper the previous evening amidst all the pandemonium. He sat down at his usual table.

  The TV was on and tuned in to TeleVigàta. The sound was turned down so softly that he almost couldn’t hear, but the images he was seeing were of the inside of the Palmisanos’ apartment.

  Some asshole journalist must have taken advantage of the door he’d left open, going inside and filming the home of the crazy old pair of loons. Apparently the guy had used some sort of battery-powered lamp for lighting, which, in casting its beam edgewise onto the crucifixes and pianos, showed them emerging from the darkness with a sinister, menacing air, exactly the way they had looked to Montalbano the night before.

  “Hello, Inspector, what can I get for you?”

  “Come back in five minutes.”

  Now the cameraman was in Gregorio’s bedroom. And he lingered for at least five minutes on the inflatable doll, first showing a full-length shot, then a close-up of the hairless spots on the head, the missing eye, the shrivelled breast, then one by one the patches that Gregorio had made to keep it from deflating, which looked like so many little wounds covered by adhesive bandages.

  “So, what can I get for you?”

  How was it that he suddenly no longer felt hungry?

  He ate so little that he didn’t even feel the need to take his customary meditative stroll. And so he went back to the office and started signing papers. Nothing of any substance had happened for a good month. Of course the Palmisano incident had certainly provided a little excitement, even a touch of tragicomedy, but it hadn’t had any major consequences, and there hadn’t been any dead or wounded. On several occasions during the past month, he had, in fact, thought of taking a few days off and going to Boccadasse to be with Livia. But he’d always let it slide, afraid that some unforeseen development might force him to interrupt his vacation. And who would deal with Livia then?

  “Galluzzo finally found the pistol,” said Fazio, coming in.

  “Where was it?”

  “In Caterina’s room. Hidden inside a hollow statue of the Madonna.”

  “Any new developments?”

  “Dead calm. Did you know that Catarella has a theory about it?”

  “About what?”

  “About the fact that there are less robberies.”

  “And how does he explain it?”

  “He says that the robbers, the local ones, who rob the homes of working poor or snatch women’s purses, are ashamed.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of their big-time colleagues. The CEOs who drive their companies to bankruptcy after making off with people’s savings, the banks who are always finding a way to screw their customers, the big companies that steal public funds. Whereas they, the petty thieves who have to make do with ten euros or a broken TV or a computer that doesn’t work . . . they feel ashamed, and don’t feel like stealing anymore.”

  As could have been expected, at midnight, TeleVigàta broadcast a special report covering the entire Palmisano incident.

  Naturally they showed footage of Montalbano climbing the ladder while Gregorio was shooting at him from the terrace, and the whole thing, seen from the outside, confirmed Catarella’s interpretation. That is, it really did look as though nothing could stop the inspector. You needed only to see the determination with which he climbed over the balustrade with a gun in one hand and hear the authority with which he ordered the people on the ground to turn off the searchlight.

  In short, a moment worthy of the TV series Captains Courageous.

  None of the fear, trembling, or vertigo he had felt halfway up showed in the video. Luckily there was no device in the world, not even an X-ray machine, not even a CAT scanner, that could show inner distress and well-concealed fear. But when the footage of the inflatable doll began, Montalbano turned off the TV.

  He just couldn’t stand it. It made him feel weirder than if it was actually a real, live girl in flesh and blood.

  Before going to bed, he phoned Livia.

  “I saw you, you know,” she said right off the bat.

  “Where?”

  “On TV, on the national news.”

  Fucking bastards. The TeleVigàta crew had sold their story!

  “I was really scared for you,” Livia continued.

  “When?”

  “When you had that moment of vertigo on the ladder.”

  “You’re right. But nobody seemed to notice.”

  “I did. But couldn’t you have sent Augello up there instead? He’s so much younger than you. You really can’t be doing these kinds of things anymore at your age!”

  Montalbano started to worry. So now Livia, too, was starting in with this crap about his age?

  “You talk as if I was fucking Methuselah, for Chrissakes!”

  “Don’t use obscenities, I won’t stand for it! Who ever mentioned Methuselah? You’re becoming so neurotic!”

  With a start like that, the whole thing could only end on a sour note.

  “Ahh Chief, Chief! Ahh Chief! Hizzoner the C’mishner’s been callin’ f’yiz since eight aclack! Jeezis, was he mad! ’E sez ’e wants yiz a call ’im emergently straightaways!”

  “All right, give him a ring and pass the call to me,” said Montalbano, heading for his office.

  His conscience was clean. Since nothing had happened of late, he hadn’t had the opportunity to do anything that might appear a sin of commission or omission in the eyes of the commissioner.

  “Montalbano?”

  “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

  “Would you please explain to me why you allowed several television cameramen to do whatever the hell they pleased in the home of those two crazy old people?”

  “But I never—”

  “Just know that I’ve been bombarded with telephone calls of protest—from the bishop’s office to the Union of Catholic Fathers, to the FaFa Club to the—”

  “I’m sorry sir, I didn’t quite get the name of that club.”

  “FaFa. Would you prefer FF? The full name is the Faith and Family Club.”

  “But what are they protesting?”

  “They’re offended by the images of that obscene inflatable doll.”

  “Ah, I see. At any rate, I didn’t allow anyone to go in there.”

  “Oh, no? Then how did they get in?”

  “Through the door, I would imagine.”

  “Breaking the seals?”

  The place had never been sealed off. Should he have ordered it sealed? At any rate, seals or no seals, he should at least have closed the door.

  His only hope was to start talking legalese-bureaucratese, the kind where after a couple of sentences nobody understands a fucking thing anymore.

  “Mr. Commissioner, if I may. In the case in point, we hadn’t ascertained any conditions whereby we should have recourse to the application of said seals, given that while the apartment in question had been the scene of behavior qualifiable, at the very least, as violent, we were not cognizant of any harm having come to anyone’s person as a result of said behavior, and therefore—”

  “Fine, fine, but in entering without authorization, they committed a serious infraction.”

  “A very serious infraction. And there may be more,” said the inspector, trying to up the ante.

  “What do you mean?”

  Pile on the legalese-bureaucratese.

  “Who’s to say the cameraman and journalist didn’t take
some of the objects found on the premises? With its voluminous spatial capacity, that apartment could be termed more than a civilian residence. It may well be classifiable as an antiques warehouse, in view of the fact that it contains, however uninventoried, a wealth of artistically sculpted gold crosses, illustrated Bibles of untold value, rosaries of mother-of-pearl, silver, and gold, as well as—”

  “Fine, fine, I’m going to take the necessary measures,” the commissioner interrupted him, put off by Montalbano’s tone of voice.

  And thus the folks at TeleVigàta, having a few cats to comb, would learn their lesson.

  On the midday news broadcast, TeleVigàta’s purse-lipped prince of opinion, Pippo Ragonese, the one with a face like a chicken’s ass, said angrily that the broadcasting station, “known for its absolute independence of judgment,” had been subjected to “strong pressure from a variety of sources” in an attempt to halt any further broadcasting of the news feature on the Palmisano home, particularly the footage involving the doll. He let it be known that the journalist and cameraman who had entered the apartment were in danger of being indicted for “breaking and entering and theft of art objects.”

  In the face of such intimidation, Ragonese solemnly proclaimed that as of that moment, and for the entire afternoon and evening until the eight P.M. news edition, TeleVigàta would broadcast nothing but the images of the inflatable doll.

  And so they did.

  But only until six P.M., because at that time two carabinieri showed up and confiscated the videotape by order of the prefect.

  By the following morning, needless to say, all the national papers and television news programs were talking about the affair. A few were against the confiscation; one of the most important national dailies, the one printed in Rome, published the headline:

  Is There No Limit to the Ridiculousness?

  Others instead were in favor. In fact, the other major newspaper, the one printed in Milan, ran the headline:

  The Death of Good Taste

  And there wasn’t a single stand-up comic on television that evening who didn’t appear onstage with an inflatable doll.

  That night, Montalbano had a dream which, if it wasn’t about an actual inflatable doll, as would have been logical and predictable, was about something that came very close.

  He was making love to a beautiful young blonde who worked as a salesgirl in a mannequin factory that was deserted, as it was past closing time. They were lying on a sofa in the sales office, surrounded by at least ten mannequins, male and female, who stared fixedly at them, polite little smiles on their lips.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” the girl kept saying to him, her eyes on a large clock on the wall, because they both knew what the problem was. She had obtained permission to become human, but if they didn’t manage to bring their business to a happy conclusion, she would turn back into a mannequin forever.

  “C’mon, c’mon . . .”

  They finally succeeded, with only three seconds left on the clock. The mannequins in the room applauded.

  He woke up and ran into the bathroom to take a shower. But how could it be that at fifty-seven he was still having the dreams of a twenty-year-old? Maybe old age wasn’t quite so near at hand as it seemed? The dream reassured him.

  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.

  3

  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 coul
dn’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.