Andrea Camilleri - The Dance of the Seagull

“Nothing, just some chickenshit, no need to worry.”

Catarella went out, not very convinced.

Montalbano took a deep breath and decided to do something he really had no desire to do. Might as well start with the worst. He dialed Dr. Pasquano’s phone number.

“Hello, is the doctor in?”

“The doctor’s busy.”

“Montalbano here. Please get him for me.”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, you’ll have to excuse me, but I’m really not up to it. He’s darker than a storm cloud this morning, and at the moment he’s right in the middle of an autopsy.”

Pasquano must have dropped a lot of cash playing poker at the club last night. When this happened, one was better off dealing with a starving polar bear.

“Maybe you know the answer to my question. Did any new bodies come in last night?”

“You mean fresh corpses? No.”

The inspector heaved a sigh of mild relief.

He got up, went out of the office, and when passing by Catarella, told him:

“I’m off to Montelusa. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. If Inspector Augello asks for me, tell him to call me on my cell phone.”

There were three hospitals and two private clinics in Montelusa. It used to be that all you had to do was tell them over the phone that you were with the police, and they would tell you anything about anyone. Then, with the advent of pain-in-the-ass privacy laws, if you didn’t go in person and show your badge, they wouldn’t tell you a goddamn thing. At any rate, Fazio wasn’t in any of the three hospitals. Now came the hard part: the private clinics, whose concept of secrecy outdid even that of Swiss banks. How many fugitive mafiosi had been operated on in those clinics? The reception area of the first clinic Montalbano visited looked like the lobby of a five-star hotel. Behind a front desk so shiny it could have been used as a mirror were two women dressed in white, one young and the other old. He went up to the latter and donned a very serious face.

“I’m Inspector Montalbano, police,” he said, taking out his badge.

“How may I help you?”

“My men will be here in ten minutes. I want all the patients to remain in their rooms, and no visitors who are already here can leave.”

“Are you joking?”

“I have a search warrant. We are looking for a dangerous fugitive named Fazio who we believe was admitted here yesterday.”

The woman, who had turned pale as a ghost, reacted.

“But no one has been admitted here for the past two days! Look for yourself!” she said, turning her computer screen towards him.

“Listen, there’s no point arguing! We have learned that the Materdei Clinic—”

“But this isn’t Materdei!”

“It’s not?”

“No! We’re the Salus Clinic.”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’ve made a mistake. I’m terribly sorry. I’ll be on my way, then. Ah, but one very important thing: you mustn’t, under any circumstances, notify the Materdei.”

At the second clinic they actually threw him out. There was a head nurse of about sixty, at least six-foot-one, skinny as death and just as ugly, the spitting image of Olive Oyl.

“We don’t accept wounded people off the street.”

“Fine, signora, but—”

“I’m not married.”

“Well, don’t despair. You’ll see, one day your prince charming will come.”

“Out!”

As he was getting back in his car, he heard someone call him. It was a doctor he knew. The inspector explained the situation to him. His friend told him to wait outside, then returned five minutes later.

“We haven’t had any new admissions for two days.”

What was going on? Was everyone bristling with good health, or did they simply not have enough money to pay the bills of the private clinics? Whatever the case, he had to conclude that Fazio hadn’t been hospitalized anywhere around there. Then where had he gone off to hide?

As he was driving back to Vigàta, his cell phone rang. It was Mimì Augello.

“Salvo, where are you?”

“I was just now in Montelusa making the rounds of the hospitals. There’s no sign of Fazio anywhere. I’m on my way back.”

“Listen . . . Maybe you should . . .”

Montalbano immediately understood.

“Don’t worry, he’s not at the morgue, either. How about you? Got any news?”

“That’s what I was calling about. Can you come to the port? I’ll wait for you at the entrance.”

“Which one?”

“I’m just outside the southern gate.”

“I’ll be right there.”

The southern gate, the one closest to the eastern jetty, where the inspector often went for a walk after eating, was used mostly by the steady flow of cars and trucks about to get on the ferryboat for Lampedusa. The ferry left at midnight. Once the season began, that area of the port was a bivouac of foreign kids waiting to board.

On either side of the enormous gate was a sort of sentry-box 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.