He held still for a long minute, unable to move, eyes shut tight. But then he clenched his teeth and resumed his climb, even more slowly than before.
When he reached the balustrade, he bolted upright, ready to start firing, but a quick glance revealed that the terrace was deserted. Gregorio had gone back inside, closing the French door behind him, and must certainly be right behind the shutter with his pistol cocked.
“Turn off the spotlight!” Montalbano yelled.
And he leapt onto the terrace, immediately lying down flat on the ground. Gregorio’s gunshot arrived on schedule, but the harsh light that had suddenly gone out had left him dazzled, forcing him to fire blindly. Montalbano fired back in turn, but couldn’t see anything. Then little by little his eyes returned to normal.
But standing up and running towards the French door while shooting was out of the question, since this time Gregorio was certain to hit him.
As he was wondering what to do, Fazio jumped over the balustrade and lay down beside him.
Now they heard rifle shots coming from inside.
“That’s Caterina firing at our men from behind the door,” Fazio said in a soft voice.
The terrace was completely bare except for a vase of flowers and a clothesline with things hanging from it; as for anything behind which they might take cover, nothing. Leaning against a wall, however, were three or four long iron poles, possibly the remains of an old gazebo.
“What should we do?” asked Fazio.
“Run over there and grab one of those metal poles. If it’s not rusted through, I think you should be able to bust open the French door. Give me your gun. Ready? Here we go . . . One, two, three!”
They stood up, and Montalbano started shooting both pistols, feeling slightly ridiculous, like some sheriff in a ’Murcan movie. Then he pulled up alongside Fazio, who was using the pole as a lever, still shooting, this time at the shutter. At last the French door flew open, and they found themselves in near total darkness, because the large room they had entered was barely illuminated by the faint light of an oil lamp on a small table. It had been some time since the Palmisanos stopped using electrical lighting, and no doubt they no longer had power.
Where was the crazy old man hiding? They heard two rifle shots ring out in a nearby room. It was Caterina fighting off the efforts of Mimì, Gallo, and Galluzzo to break down the front door.
“Go and grab her from behind,” Montalbano said to Fazio, giving him back his gun. “I’ll go and look for Gregorio.”
Fazio disappeared behind a door that gave onto a hallway.
But there was another door off the room, and it was closed. Montalbano felt certain, for no particular reason, that the old man was behind it. Tiptoeing up to it, he turned the knob, and the door opened slightly. The expected gunshot never came.
And so he flung the door wide open while jumping aside. There was no reaction.
And what was Fazio up to? Why was the old lady still firing away?
He took a deep breath and went in, bent completely over, ready to shoot. And immediately he no longer knew where he was.
It was a large room, densely thicketed with a sort of forest, but of what?
Then he realized what it was and felt paralyzed by an irrational fear.
By the light of another oil lamp he saw dozens and dozens of crucifixes of varying size, ranging from three feet to ceiling-high, all held upright by wooden bases and forming indeed a tangled forest, arranged in such a way that many faced one another, with the arm of one cross cutting slantwise across the arm of the cross beside it, while other, shorter crosses had their backs to the larger crosses but stood face to face with still other crosses of the same height, and so on.
Montalbano became immediately convinced that Gregorio was not in that room and certainly would never start firing and risk striking one or more of the crucifixes. All the same, he couldn’t move, being frozen in fear like a child who finds himself alone in an empty church illuminated only by candlelight. At the far end of the large room was an open door, with the dim light of yet another oil lamp filtering through. The inspector eyed that door but was unable to take a single step.
What finally forced him to take the plunge into the woods was a shout from Fazio amidst a horrible mouselike squeaking, which was actually the sound of Caterina’s desperate cries.
“Chief! I’ve got her!”
Montalbano leapt forward, zigzagging between the crucifixes, crashing into one that lurched but did not fall, and then dashed through the far door. He found himself in a room with a double bed.
Gregorio pointed his revolver at him and fired as the inspector dived to the floor. He heard the firing pin go click; the gun was empty. He stood up. The old man, who was tall and looked like a skeleton with shoulder-length white hair, was completely naked and staring in disbelief at the revolver still in his hand. With a swift kick, Montalbano sent the gun flying across the room.
Gregorio started crying.
Then the inspector noticed, as a sense of horror very nearly overwhelmed him, that on one of the pillows lay the head of a woman with long blond hair, the rest of her body covered by a sheet. He realized at once that the body was lifeless.
Approaching the bed for a better look, he heard Gregorio order him, in a voice that sounded like sandpaper:
“Don’t you dare go near the bride that God sent me!”
He lifted the sheet.
It was a decrepit inflatable doll that had lost some of its hair, was missing an eye, had one deflated tit and little circles and rectangles of gray rubber scattered all over its body. Apparently whenever the doll sprang a leak from old age, Gregorio vulcanized it.
“Salvo, where are you?”
It was Augello.
“I’m over here. Everything’s under control.”
He heard a strange noise and looked into the neighboring room. Gallo and Galluzzo, equipped with strong battery- powered flashlights, were moving crucifixes in order to create a passageway. When they had finished, Montalbano saw Mimì and Fazio coming forward, flanked by two rows of crucifixes, restraining between them a struggling Caterina Palmisano, who continued to make mousey squeaking noises.
Caterina looked as if she had just stepped out of a horror novel. She was quite short and wearing a filthy nightgown riddled with holes, had disheveled, yellowish-white hair and big, bugged-out eyes, and only one long, blood-curdling tooth in her drooling mouth.
“I curse you!” Caterina said, looking at Montalbano with wild eyes. “You shall burn alive in the fires of Hell!”
“We can talk about that later,” the inspector replied.
“I’d call an ambulance,” Mimì suggested. “And have them both sent to the insane asylum or whatever it’s called these days.”
“We certainly can’t keep them in a holding cell,” Fazio added.
“All right, call an ambulance and take them outside. Thank the firemen and send them home. Did they break the door down?”
“No, there was no need. I opened it from the inside,” said Fazio.
“And what are you gonna do?” Augello asked.
“Did she have both of the rifles with her?” he asked Fazio instead of answering.
“Yessir.”
“Then there must be another gun around the house, the father’s pistol. I’m going to have a look around. You two go now, but leave me one of those flashlights.”
Left alone, Montalbano stuck his gun in his pocket and took a step.
But then he thought better of it and took the gun back out. True, there wasn’t anyone around anymore, but it was the place itself that made him uneasy. The flashlight cast gigantic shadows of the crucifixes on the walls. Montalbano raced through the passageway created by his men and found himself in the room that gave onto the terrace.
Feeling the need for a little fresh air, he went outside. And although the downtown air stank of the smoke of the cement factory and automobile exhausts, it smelled to him like fine mountain air compared to what he�
��d been breathing inside the Palmisanos’ apartment.
He went back inside and headed for the door that led to the hallway. Immediately on the left were three rooms in a row, while the wall on the right was solid.
The first room was Caterina’s bedroom. Atop the chest of drawers, the bedside table, and the bookcase, hundreds of little statuettes of the Madonna had been amassed, each with a little light on it in front. On the walls were another hundred or so holy pictures, all of the Blessed Virgin. Each picture had a little wooden shelf under it, on which shone a little light. It looked like a cemetery at night.
The door to the second room was locked, but the key was in the keyhole. The inspector turned it, opened the door, and went inside. By the beam of the flashlight he saw that it was an enormous room crammed full of pianos, three of them grand pianos, one with the fallboard open. Enormous spiderwebs twinkled between the different pianos. Then all at once the grand piano began to play. As Montalbano shouted in fear and withdrew, he heard the entire musical scale resonate, do re mi fa sol la ti. Were there living dead in that accursed apartment? Ghosts? He was bathed in sweat, the gun in his hand trembling slightly, but nevertheless found the strength to raise his arm and illuminate the great room with his flashlight. And he finally saw the ghostly musician. It was a large rat running wildly from one piano to another. Apparently it had run across the open keyboard.
The third room off the hallway was the kitchen. But it smelled so bad that the inspector didn’t have the courage to go in. He would have one of his men come and look for the pistol tomorrow.
When he went back down into the street, everybody was gone. He headed for his car, which was parked near the town hall, started it up, and headed home to Marinella.
At home he took a long shower, but did not go to bed afterwards. Instead he went and sat down on the veranda.
And so, instead of being awakened by the first light of day as was usually the case, it was he who watched the day awaken.
2
He decided not to go and lie down in bed. Two or three hours of sleep wouldn’t have done him any good. On the contrary, it would simply have left him feeling woozier than ever.
Actually—he thought as he went into the kitchen to prepare another four-cup espresso pot—what had happened to him the previous night was just like a nightmare that resurfaces in the mind all at once the moment you wake up and remains in the memory, though gradually fading, for only a day, so that, after another night’s sleep, the nightmare vanishes, and you have trouble remembering it, as the contours and details blur little by little until it becomes like a mosaic besieged by time, with large patches of gray wall where the colored tesserae have fallen off.
Therefore, he needed only be patient another twenty-four hours and then he could forget what he saw in the Palmisanos’ apartment and what happened to him there.
Because he simply couldn’t shake off the fright the place had given him.
The forest of crucifixes, the inflatable doll that had grown old with its owner, the great room full of pianos and spiderwebs, the musical rat, the flickering light of the oil lamps . . . And Gregorio Palmisano, naked and skinny as a skeleton, and Caterina with only one tooth . . . For a horror film, it wasn’t a bad beginning.
The problem, however, was that it wasn’t a fiction, but a reality, though a reality so absurd as to be very nearly a fiction.
But the real problem, which he tried to hide with all this talk of nightmares, truth, and fiction, actually concerned something he didn’t want to face up to—that is, the difference between his behavior and that of his men.
Nor did he face up to it now, since the coffee was ready, and he took advantage of it.
Carrying it out onto the veranda, he drank the first cup of his second pot.
He gazed for a long time at the sky, the sea, the beach. The dawning day had to be relished little by little, like a jam too sweet.
“Good morning, Inspector,” the usual solitary fisherman greeted him, busy with his boat.
Montalbano raised a hand in reply.
“Happy fishing!” he said.
“Could I say something?” asked Montalbano Two, suddenly appearing and launching into his commentary without waiting for an answer. “The problem that you’re doing your utmost to avoid can be boiled down to two questions. The first is: Why were Gallo and Galluzzo not the least bit frightened by the forest of crucifixes and in fact seemed rather indifferent as they moved them aside? The second: Why, when he saw the inflatable doll, was Mimì not taken aback, but merely smiled at the thought that Gregorio Palmisano was a horny old goat?”
“Well, everyone is different and behaves accordingly,” said Montalbano One, caught off-guard . . .
“That’s trite but true, but the problem is that there was a time in the life of our inspector when he would have reacted the same way as Gallo and Galluzzo in front of those crucifixes, and like Mimì in front of the doll. At one time in his life.”
“Would you guys knock it off?” said Montalbano, realizing where Number Two was headed.
“I would like to make my point. In my opinion, the good inspector has changed since then, and it’s because of his age. But he has a lot of trouble admitting it, indeed he refuses to admit it. For example, he acts as if he’s had an eye transplant.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I realize they don’t exist yet—eye transplants, that is. But old age has done it for him, performed the operation. He’s now got two new eyes grafted onto an aging head.”
“What do you mean, new eyes?”
“Much more sensitive. Not only do you see the things in front of you, you also perceive the aura around those things. It’s like a light, watery vapor that rises from them and—”
“And in your opinion, what kind of ‘aura’ was there around the inflatable doll?” Montalbano One asked defiantly.
“An aura of despair and solitude. That of a lonely man who spent his nights in the arms of a lifeless doll instead of a living being, and who probably calls it ‘My love.’”
“Get to the point.”
“The point is that the inspector is losing his cool, his sense of detachment, in the face of things. He’s letting himself be involved and troubled by them. And though before, too, he would let himself be taken in, now, with the years, he’s become too . . . well, too vulnerable.”
“That’s enough of that,” said Montalbano, suddenly getting up. “You guys are starting to piss me off.”
Contrary to what he’d decided, he went to bed to get a couple of hours’ sleep, and when the alarm clock went off, he woke up, feeling totally bleary, as expected.
A shower, shave, and clean underwear freshened him as best they could, at any rate putting him in a condition to show his face at the office.
Seeing him come in, Catarella leapt to his feet and started clapping.
“Bravo, Chief! Bravo!”
“What the hell’s wrong with you? Are we at the theater or something?”
“Ahh, Chief, Chief! Good God were you good! Man, so nimmel, so fast! Like a agrobat on a trappist!”
“Who?”
“You, Chief! It was better ’n a movie! An’ ’ey showed it onna TV ’iss mornin’.”
“I was on TV?!”
“Yessir, Chief, you was! When you’s climin’ the firemin’s ladder, gun in yer ’and, y’know who y’look jess like?”
“No.”
“Jess like Brussi Vìllisi, y’know, the ’Murcan actor who’s always in shoot-ats an’ boinin’ bildinz an’ sinkin’ ships . . .”
“All right, all right, settle down and get Fazio for me.”
All he needed was a ball-ache like this! Now the half of town that hadn’t seen him live in action last night could catch the replay on TV! Bruce Willis! Right! It was more like a Marx Brothers routine!
“Good morning, Chief.”
“How’d things end up with the Palmisanos?”
“How do you expect? Prosecutor Tallari
ta threw the book at ’em. Resisting arrest, attempted multiple homicide, attempted massacre . . .”
“Where’d they take them?”
“To a clinic for the mentally ill, on twenty-four-hour watch.”
“That seems a bit excessive. They haven’t got any weapons, so what are they gonna—”
“Do you know what Caterina did to an orderly there, Chief?”
“No. What’d she do?”
“She broke a chair over his head!”
“Why’d she do that?”
“Because the guy was clearly an Arab, and so for her, he was an enemy of God.”
“Listen, I want to send somebody to look for a pistol that must be hidden away somewhere in the Palmisanos’ apartment.”
“I’ll take care of it right away. I’ll send Galluzzo and a couple of other guys.”
Half an hour later, Fazio knocked on the door and came in.
“I’m sorry, Chief, but yesterday, when you left the Palmisanos’ apartment, did you close the door? I left the keys in the keyhole after opening the door for Inspector Augello.”
Montalbano thought about this for a few seconds.
“You know I don’t even remember whether I closed it or not? Why do you ask?”
“Because Galluzzo called me just now and said he found the door to the apartment wide open.”
“Was anything missing?”
“According to Galluzzo, probably nothing’s missing. It’s all more or less the way he remembered leaving it last night. But how can you really tell in all that clutter?”
I congratulate you, dear Inspector, for the consummate bravery, the sublime disregard for danger you displayed when left alone in that famous house of horrors. Your long struggle with the musical rat wore you out so completely that you ran away at full speed, actually forgetting to close the door. Not bad. Congratulations again.
Treasure Hunt Page 2
