Treasure Hunt

by Andrea Camilleri

  “If you’re selling something, we never buy a fucking thing, and we pay all our bills at the bank.”

  He was about to shut the door when Montalbano stuck a foot inside and blocked it.

  “Remove that foot or I’ll break it.”

  “Calm down. I’m not selling anything and I don’t have any bills for you to pay. I’m Inspector Montalbano, police.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “I want to talk to Francesco Diluigi. Is he your son?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Come in.”

  The entrance hall was tidy and welcoming.

  “Carmelina! Come quick!” the man yelled.

  A woman of slightly greater heft than the man appeared.

  Red-haired, bespectacled, and unkempt, she was wearing a sweatsuit that sagged in every direction.

  “This gentleman is a police inspector and wants to talk to you about your precious little boy,” the man said, leaving the entranceway.

  “What can I do for you?” the woman said. “So you are . . . ?”

  “Inspector Montalbano.”

  “Inspector of what?”

  “I’m with the police.”

  “My son is an angel,” the woman was keen to point out before anything else, assuming an air of defiance and putting her hands on her ample hips.

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute, signora.”

  But the woman insisted.

  “My son couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong.”

  “Of that I’m convinced, signora.”

  “My son . . .”

  “. . . is a rare pearl.”

  “That’s exactly right!”

  “Can I see him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s not at home?”

  “He is. But he’s been in bed with a fever since this morning. He would like to get up, but I won’t let him.”

  “Why not?”

  “The change in temperature might make him sicker.”

  “All right then, I’ll go to his room myself.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You don’t know what Francesco’s like! He might get scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “He’s very sensitive! And defenseless. He might get frightened to see a police inspector appear at his bedside. Do you really have to tell him?”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That you’re an inspector. Can’t you pretend you’re the doctor I called, who hasn’t arrived yet?”

  “Out of the question.”

  She looked at Montalbano with the expression of a person about to lay her head on the executioner’s chopping block. He realized it was hopeless, and heaved a sigh of resignation.

  “All right, then. Come with me.”

  But when they entered the room, the boy wasn’t in his bed.

  “He must have gone to the bathroom. He has a little diarrhea. I’ll go give him a hand.”

  Give him a hand at what? Wiping his heinie?

  “In the meantime you can make yourself comfortable.”

  In the room it was beastly hot. There was a small electric heater in the corner, turned on. Aside from the bed, there was a small wardrobe, a bookcase, a small worktable with a computer on it, turned off, and a chair.

  Montalbano started looking at the books.

  The ones on the top shelf interested him the most: Venus in Furs, Justine, The Story of O, a treatise on sexual psychopathology, two leather-bound years’ worth of Penthouse . . . He must work a lot with his hands, the rare pearl. The mother returned.

  “He’ll be here in just a minute. I see you’re looking at his books. Just imagine, neither I nor my husband have ever even opened a book, except for the ones they gave us at school. But him! D’you see how many he has? He just loves books. I tell him he’s going to ruin his eyes one day, but he won’t hear of it. And he doesn’t want anyone ever to touch them. He dusts them off himself. All he ever does is read and sit at the computer.”

  Looking at porno sites, no doubt.

  “And his teachers don’t understand him! They’re jealous of his intelligence and purposely give him bad grades!”

  At last Francesco arrived, in pajamas and slippers and a woolen blanket wrapped around him. As he was getting back into bed with the loving help of his mother, the first question that popped into the inspector’s head was:

  “How do you manage to stand up?”

  Because Francesco, big and bulky as he was, didn’t look like he was made of flesh and blood, but of some sort of yellowy chicken gelatin, to be exact, which quivered all over with every move he made and seemed to lose its texture.

  “Don’t tire him out,” his mother advised, lying down in bed alongside her little jewel.

  Was she planning on staying there for the questioning?

  “I’m sorry, signora, but I would like to speak with your son alone,” Montalbano said, polite but firm.

  “But I am his mother!”

  “I have never had the slightest doubt of that, signora, but I’m asking you please to leave just the same.”

  “No!”

  “Oh, all right.” The inspector sighed.

  Then, turning to Francesco:

  “That day at the party, when Ninetta slapped you—”

  “What are you saying?” said the woman, springing to her feet.

  Then she turned to Francesco, who seemed to be melting before their eyes, and asked:

  “Who dared?”

  “Mamma, come on, leave us alone,” said Francesco.

  Without saying a word, and with eyes shooting flames, the mother indignantly headed for the door. But before going out, she turned and said:

  “And this is the thanks I get, Francesco, for everything I do for you every minute of the day?”

  And she slammed the door behind her. At the theater it would have been a great exit line worthy of applause, no doubt.

  13

  “Did . . . did Ninetta report me?” Francesco asked in a now liquefied voice.

  “Nobody reported you.”

  But why was he still wasting time with this worm?

  “Just answer one question for me and then I’ll go. Do you know how to drive?”

  “I don’t have my license.”

  “I didn’t ask you whether you had your license, I asked if you know how to drive.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t even know how to drive a motorbike.”

  Montalbano opened the door to leave and very nearly smashed it into the face of the signora, who was crouching down, listening and spying through the keyhole. She raced into her son’s room, and Montalbano let himself out of the apartment.

  He was furious at himself. Michele had tried to tell him what kind of person Francesco was, but he wouldn’t listen. If he had, it would have saved him some time.

  “Anyone call for me?”

  “F’yiz poissonally in poisson, no.”

  “Then send me Fazio.”

  “’E in’t onna premisses, Chief.”

  “Then send me Inspector Augello.”

  “’E in’t onna premisses neither.”

  “So where is he?”

  “Witta foresaid Fazio, Chief.”

  The moment he sat down, the inspector picked up the receiver to call Bonmarito, just to stay in touch and let him know that he was working hard to find his daughter. But he immediately put the phone back down.

  He suddenly didn’t have the courage. If the guy started asking questions, what was he going to tell him? That things were looking pretty bleak?

  Yes, because from everything he’d been told first by Lina and then by Michele, this was the very conclusion he had drawn, unfortunately. That the girl had been kidnapped not by a jilted boyfriend or a rejected suitor, but by someone Ninetta may well have never seen before. Ninetta had had the bad luck to walk into the path of someone out looking for a girl to kidnap, any girl at all. Well, maybe not just any girl; maybe she had to have certain qualiti
es, and if it hadn’t been Ninetta, someone who looked like her would have been just fine. If it was someone from Ninetta’s circle of friends, he would certainly have known that there was no point lying in wait around the movie house, because Lina would inevitably give Ninetta a ride home on her scooter. Except that night she didn’t. But the kidnapper couldn’t have known this. Unless we were to assume complicity between Lina and the kidnapper, but that seemed impossible. In conclusion, there wasn’t a single starting point that might in some way limit the scope of the investigation.

  Mimì and Fazio came in at the same time.

  “Where were you guys?”

  “You tell him,” Mimì said brusquely to Fazio. “I’ve got something I need to take care of. See you later this evening.”

  And he dashed out of the office without saying goodbye. He seemed worried and upset. Montalbano looked on with a touch of astonishment as he closed the door behind him.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he asked Fazio.

  “I dunno. He got all touchy when I started talking to him about the missing girl.”

  “And why’d you talk to him about her?”

  “Why, wasn’t I supposed to?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, I just want to know how you happened to talk to him about the kidnapping. You know, like, what brought it up?”

  The question had a precise reason behind it. Despite the fact that they’d been working together for so many years, you couldn’t really say that Augello and Fazio communicated much between them.

  “I had to, Chief. I’ll explain. When I got back from making those rounds you asked me to do—”

  “Speaking of which, did you find anything out?”

  “Nobody noticed anything, though two of the shopkeepers were already closing up.”

  “Big surprise there!”

  “But do you know where the Splendor is located?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “It’s a brand-new cinema in the New Vigàta, on a street with five shops and four apartment buildings, one of which is ready and the other three not rented out yet.”

  “How did Ninetta get there, I wonder? She hasn’t even got a scooter.”

  “I’m sure she took the circle line, which stops on a street parallel to the one the cinema’s on.”

  “Therefore when they said goodbye outside the theater, her friend drove off on her scooter, while Ninetta must have headed for the street where the bus stops.”

  “Right.”

  “We have to do something, Fazio, and fast. As soon as we’re done talking, I want you to go to the urban transportation management offices and get the name of whoever was working the circle line around eight last night. Track him down, show him the girl’s picture, and ask him if he saw her getting on the bus at that stop.”

  “There’s one problem. I don’t have the photo anymore. Inspector Augello asked for it and I gave it to him.”

  “Why’d he want it?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Montalbano remained pensive for a moment. Then he made up his mind.

  “Go to bus management anyway, without the photograph. Describe her to the driver. A pretty girl like that, people are going to remember her. Now continue what you were saying about Mimì.”

  “So, as I was saying, when I got back, Inspector Augello came into my office for some information and he saw Nina’s photograph. He picked it up, looked at it closely, and asked me why I had it, so I told him the whole story. He wanted to know everything. Then the phone rang. It was someone calling to say there was a car on fire near the sixth kilometer of the provincial road to Montereale. They even said it looked like an SUV.”

  An SUV? Montalbano pricked up his ears.

  “And then Augello said he was coming with me,” Fazio concluded.

  “So what was it?”

  “When we got there the car was still burning. It’d been abandoned in the open country, but very close to the road. We were unable to put out the fire with extinguishers. My immediate impression was that it was Vilardo’s SUV. And when I was able to clean off part of the license plate, I saw that it really was Vilardo’s car.”

  “Did you look in the trunk?”

  “Yeah, but there was nothing. Luckily.”

  “So you too were thinking you might find Ninetta’s body in there?”

  “Yeah, but I called Forensics anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Chief, I know that the less we get Dr. Arquà mixed up in things, the better, but I thought it all out.”

  “You thought what out?”

  “I asked myself a question. If the guy who kidnapped the girl took the SUV out to the open country to set it on fire, how did he get back? There are only two possible answers: either he has an accomplice who followed him in another car and drove him back, or he took public transportation.”

  “Well, he certainly didn’t hitchhike.”

  “No, but on the other hand, there’s a stop for the Vigàta bus just a few yards away.”

  “Come on, Fazio! So according to you the guy’s gonna raise a hand and the bus is gonna pull up like nobody’s business when everybody can see there’s an SUV burning up just ten feet away?”

  “No, Chief, that’s not what I’m saying. At that moment the SUV is not burning up, it’s a perfectly normal SUV that someone has driven out to the country.”

  “So how’s the guy gonna set it on fire?”

  “With a timer, Chief. The SUV catches fire, let’s say, fifteen minutes after the bus has passed. That’s why I called Forensics. And it took them about a minute to confirm my theory.”

  “Well done, Fazio!” the inspector said with all his heart.

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  “But all this complicates matters considerably, because it shows that the kidnapper’s someone who not only has a timing device available to him, but knows how to use it. It’s not like everybody in Vigàta’s got timers lying about the house.”

  “Chief, if you know how to do it, you can turn a common alarm clock into a timing device. I know you see it all the time in American movies, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  Indeed it was true.

  “But there’s still another question we have to ask,” said the inspector. “What need was there to torch the car? Couldn’t he just have left it somewhere without setting it on fire?”

  Fazio threw up his hands.

  “Let’s think about this for a minute. And before asking that question, there’s another we should ask ourselves.”

  “What?”

  “Why would someone need a particular kind of car, like an SUV, to kidnap somebody?”

  “Well,” said Fazio, “I can answer that. Apparently the place where he decided to hide the girl is somewhere in the country that can’t be reached with a regular car.”

  “I agree with you there. But then, when he no longer needs it, why torch it? We know the car was used to transport the girl, right? But we don’t know who was driving. Which means that there was something inside that car, after they used it, that would make it possible to identify him. And that was why he had to burn it up.”

  “There wasn’t anything inside the car.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could see with the naked eye.”

  “You talking about fingerprints?”

  “Not only. DNA, too. You know how many traces he must have left? A shitload! This kidnapper is someone who thinks of everything. He’s got a very precise, well-ordered mind. And he’s making us sweat.”

  “Could I say something, Chief? This whole kidnapping scares me a little.”

  “Me too. Did you tell Vilardo he can forget about his SUV?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do it now. Then go immediately to the bus offices.”

  “Chief, ’iss ’at kid ’ass a frenn o’ Signura Sciosciostrommi’s onna line.”

  Arturo! He’d almost forgotten all about him. But he had no desire to start talking about the treasure hunt right now. T
here were more serious matters to think about.

  “Listen, Cat, tell him I’m busy, and also tell him there’s no news about that business we were talking about.”

  “Who, Chief?”

  “Who what, Cat?”

  “Whoozit ’at knows about wha’ we’s talkin’ about? Me, him, or youse poissonally in poisson? Cuz I dunno nuttin’ ’bout no bitness we’s talkin’ about.”

  The inspector felt his head spinning.

  “Listen, don’t tell him anything, just put the call through to me.”

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you, Inspector, but I’m anxious to know if there’s any—”

  “There’s no news, unfortunately. Our friend hasn’t deigned to send us any.”

  “Don’t you find that odd?”

  “I don’t know what to say. But you’ll have to excuse me now, I’m a little busy. Just sit tight, and I’ll get back to you.”

  Since, as Ingrid said, the kid had no love interests or friends, he therefore had all the time in the world to waste on chickenshit.

  He was about to leave to go home when Mimì Augello appeared.

  “Can we talk in private for a minute?” Mimì asked.

  “Certainly. Have a seat.”

  “Can I lock the door?”

  “You can do whatever you like.”

  He locked the door and sat down. He seemed to be in a strange mood, between embarrassed and determined.

  Montalbano helped him out.

  “What’s wrong, Mimì?”

  “I have something confidential to tell you. I could just as easily not tell you, now that I’ve cleared things up, but since I think it might be useful to you, I’ll tell you. Even though it costs me a great deal.”

  “Useful to me for what, Mimì?”

  “For the investigation into the missing girl.”

  But he still couldn’t make up his mind to tell him whatever it was that would be useful in the investigation. Montalbano realized that it was best not to force him. Then Mimì summoned his courage and spoke.

  “About two months ago I went to a house of assignation.”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever done a . . .” The inspector’s eyes met Mimì’s and suddenly he understood.