Bastia, a traveling fortune-teller in Northern Italy, is foraging for blackberries by the road one day when he finds a headless corpse. Since Italy is in the midst of fighting World War II, he is used to seeing bodies, but he is quite far from the front lines. Because he is an outcast from society who is often thrown in jail by the police, Bastia chooses to distance himself from the body by traveling to the nearby Monticello. While he plays his hurdy-gurdy, interprets dreams, and his parrot Pasqualino passes out fortune cards, Bastia sees a man wearing the boots of the body. He chases the man down and removes the boots. Back at his stand, he advises people on which numbers they should pick for the weekly lottery, consulting his cabala, which assigns a number for every scenario that could happen in the world. As he does so, he tries to piece together details of the murder to see what numbers they reveal. After getting a drink at a wine shop, Bastia determines two of the numbers, 84 for man beheaded and 14 for butchering. He goes to the post office to get his lottery numbers, trying to come up with a third one, when he hears a man inside pick 14, 84, and 72. This perplexes Bastia. Shortly after, the authorities find the body. In the crowd, Bastia sees the man from the post office. He notices a fly travel from the corpse to the man's jacket, and then to his finger, where he sees dried blood under the man's fingernail. Bastia asks someone nearby who the man is, and they say that he is a butcher. All this makes sense to Bastia, but he is still confused as to why the man picked 72, which means bride. A few days pass, and it is time for the lottery drawing. When the numbers arrive from Rome, Bastia went to see them, but none were 14, 84, or 72. He suspected that these numbers were too obvious which is why they weren't drawn. The people in the crowd grow angry at him for giving them bad numbers. Bastia leaves Monticello to wait for them to calm down. As he travels, he gets angry at Pasqualino, who will not pay any attention to him. He sets the boots from the body on his hurdy-gurdy and taunts the parrot with chestnuts. The bird reaches for the nuts but grabs a boot instead, dragging it towards its cage, which causes a little card to fall out of the boot. Bastia reads the card, which says that the cardholder is authorized to claim cattle on behalf of the Partisan brigade. All that week, Bastia drags his hurdy-gurdy from town to town until he stops in front of a butcher shop. He waits until all the customers have left before going in. The butcher, who's name is Mastrantonio, is the one he saw in the post office and in the crowd. He offers to correct the numbers in the man's cabala in exchange for some meat, telling the man that he knows the numbers from the murder. He looks through the butcher's cabala and sees that his number 72 is labeled assassin. Bastia tells the butcher that the first number is 55 for cattle, which is the reason for the crime. The second is 11 for partisan, the person murdered. He doesn't tell the butcher the third number, but he tells Mastrantonio that the missing head will bear the answer. The town of Monticello is abuzz with energy when they discover a head. A peasant brings it into the police station wrapped in newspapers. When the police unwrap it, however, they see that it is the head of the mayor. They find Mastrantonio's belongings next to the body of the mayor and take him in for questioning. He tells them how the mayor was involved, but the police choose to cover up the mayor's involvement, pinning both murders on Mastrantonio. Bastia may be the only one who really knows what happened. The mayor had been giving the town's cattle away to the Germans in exchange for payment, but on the day of the exchange, the partisans happened to arrive first. The Germans killed three of them, but the fourth escaped. The mayor had the partisan killed and disposed of Mastrantonio. When Mastrantonio went to get the head from the mayor, upon the suggestion from Bastia, he was unable to, so decided to take the head of the mayor instead, thinking that it would somehow lead to winning the lottery. Armed with this knowledge, Bastia played the numbers 15, 41, and 67, meaning the patriot, the traitor, and the accomplice. When the winning numbers come in from Rome, Bastia sees that none of his numbers have been chosen. He tells Pasqualino that the universe works in mysterious ways, and that the people who know its secrets probably wouldn't be playing the lottery.