Treasure Hunt Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 couldn’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