The Dance of the Seagull Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the customs police on duty, who checked the comings and goings.
    But at that hour of the morning, all was quiet. The pandemonium of cars and passengers began around five P.M .
    “At night this gate and the central one are closed. Only the northern gate stays open,” Mimì explained.
    “Why’s that?”
    “Because that’s the area of the port where the trawlers dock and put out and where the cold storage houses and refrigerator trucks are. It’s basically the hub for the seafood business.”
    “Well, if something has happened to Fazio, it happened at night.”
    “That’s my point.”
    “Then why are we standing at the wrong gate?”
    “It may be the wrong gate, but the Customs cop on duty, whose name is Sassu, was working the northern gate last night.”
    “Did he see anything?”
    “Come, you can talk to him yourself.”
    Sassu looked to be just over twenty, but he seemed to be a quick, intelligent kid.
    “The fishing boats start to come in just after midnight,” he said. “They unload, and then one part of the day’s haul is immediately warehoused; another part is loaded onto the refrigerator trucks, which then leave at once. There’s usually a lot of bustle until about three in the morning. Afterwards, there’s about an hour of calm. And it was just before four o’clock that I heard the shots.”
    “How many?” Montalbano asked him.
    “Two.”
    “Are you sure they were gunshots?”
    “Not at all. It might have been a motorbike backfiring. And, in fact, just a few minutes later a large motorcycle drove by. And that reassured me at the time.”
    “Was there a second rider in back?”
    “No.”
    “And you didn’t hear any cries or yells?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Were you able to tell where the shots were coming from?”
    This time Sassu seemed less certain.
    “It’s strange,” he said softly.
    “What’s strange?”
    “Now that I think about it . . . It couldn’t have been a motorcycle.”
    “Why not?”
    “There was an interval of a couple of seconds between the two shots. The first one sounded like it came from over by the slips, but the second one was a lot farther away, out past the second or third storehouse . . . If it was a motorbike, the two bursts should have come from the same spot.”
    “Did it sound like someone chasing someone else trying to run away and firing at him?”
    “Yeah, something like that.”
    They thanked the Customs officer.
    “I don’t like the look of this,” Augello observed darkly.
    “Let’s go for a little walk,” the inspector said.
    “Where to?”
    “To the area between the slips and the two storehouses.”
    There were about ten cold storage warehouses, all in a row on the outside part of the central wharf, which was a sort of arm jutting out right in the middle of the harbor. The trawlers would moor directly there, and once they’d unloaded their haul, they would go over to the inside part of the wharf, where they would dock at their respective berths and their crews would disembark and go home to sleep.
    Montalbano and Augello walked up and down the slipway as far as the second storehouse, eyes glued to the ground.
    The road was a mire of mud grooved with deep furrows left by truck tires. The storehouses were all closed except for the third one, which had a Ford Transit van in front of it with its doors open. Inside the van one could see electrical cables, quadrants, knobs, and valves. Perhaps the refrigeration system had failed and was being repaired. Despite the van, there wasn’t a living soul about.
    “Let’s go, we’re not going to find anything here,” said Mimì. “We’re wasting our time. We would have to dig through the mud to find any clues. Anyway, the stink in the air is starting to get to me. I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”
    To Montalbano, however, that smell not only was not a stink, he actually liked it. It was the product of a combination of algae, rotting fish, dilapidated cordage, seawater, and tar, with a