The Scent of the Night by Andrea Camilleri Read Free Book Online Page A

branches from the trunk with an electric saw, and the trunk itself had been deeply wounded by an axe. The leaves had withered and were drying up. In his confusion Montalbano realized he was weeping, sniffing up the mucus that kept dripping out of his nose, breathing in starts the way little children do. He reached out and placed his hand over the space of a particularly wide gash. Under his palm he could still feel a slight dampness from the sap; it was oozing out little by little, like the blood of a man slowly bleeding to death. He lifted his hand from the wound and tore off a few leaves, which still resisted. He put them in his pocket Then his tears gave way to a kind of lucid, controlled rage.
    He went back to his car, took off his jacket put the torch into his trouser pocket turned on the high beam of the headlights, and confronted the cast-iron gate, scaling it like a monkey, no doubt thanks to the wine, whose effect hadn't yet worn off. With a leap worthy of Tarzan, he found himself inside a garden with gravelled paths all around, carved stone benches every ten yards or so, clay pots with plants, faux-Roman amphorae with faux-marine excrescences, and capitalled columns clearly made just down the road in Fiacca. And the inevitable, complex, ultramodern barbecue grill. He headed towards the unfinished gazebo, rummaged through the tools, selected a sledgehammer, seized the handle with a firm grip, and began to shatter the ground-floor windows, of which there were two on each side of the house.
    After demolishing six windowpanes, he turned the corner and immediately saw a group of motionless, quasi-human figures. Oh God, what were they? He pulled the torch out of his pocket and turned it on. They were eight large statues, temporarily bunched together until they could be arranged by the house's owner according to his liking. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
    'Wait there, I’l l be right back,' Montalbano said to them.
    He carefully pulverized the two remaining windows, and then, twirling the sledgehammer high over his head — just as Orlando in fury had done with his sword — he let loose on the group of statues, swinging blindly in every direction.
    In some ten minutes' time, all that was left of Snow White, Happy, Grumpy, Dumpy, Sleazy, Snoopy, Duck, and Bumful, or whatever the hell they were called, was a litter of tiny coloured fragments. Montalbano, however, still didn't feel satisfied. Also near the u nfinished gazebo, he discovered some cans of spray paint. Picking up the green, he wrote the word arsehole four times in big block letters, once on each side of the house. After which he rescaled the front gate, got back in his car, and drove home to Marinella, now feeling completely sober again.
     
    Back home in Marinella, he spent half the night putting his house back in order after the havoc he'd created looking for the notary's receipt. Not that it really need have taken all that time, but the fact is, when you empty out all your drawers you find a great many old, forgotten papers, some of which demand, almost by force, to be read, and you inevitably end up plunging deeper and deeper into the vortex of memory, as things that for years upon years you'd done all in your power to forget begin to come back to you. It's a wicked game, memory, one that you always end up losing.
    He went to bed around three in the morning. But after getting up at least three times to drink a glass of water, he decided to bring a jug into the bedroom, setting it on the nightstand Result: by seven o'clock his belly was as though pregnant with water. It was a cloudy morning, and this increased his nervous agitation, which was already at the high-water mark from his bad night. The telephone rang. He picked up the receiver with determination.
    'Don't be breaking my balls, Cat.'
    ‘ Is not who you tink, signore, is me ’ 'And who are you?'
    'Don you re c'nize me, signore? Is Adelina’'Adelina! What's the matter?' 'Signore, I wante d a tell