Temporary Perfections

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  The ATM records provided nothing useful, since the last withdrawal had been made in Bari on the Friday before she disappeared.

  In the days that followed, a number of photographs of Manuela, with a description of the clothing she was probably wearing that afternoon, were published in local newspapers and shown on the television program Chi l’ha visto?. Some of those photographs were in the file. I looked at them for a long time, searching for a secret, or at least an idea of some kind. Of course, I found nothing, and the only brilliant conclusion that I managed to draw from my examination was that Manuela was—or had been—a very attractive young woman.

  After the photographs were published, as Fornelli had told me and as always seems to happen with disappearances, a number of people—nearly all of them of good candidates for psychiatric treatment—had phoned in and claimed to have seen the missing girl.

  The third report showed the effects that publishing the photographs had on an array of mentally unbalanced individuals. There were a dozen or so statements sent from Carabinieri stations all over Italy. They were all declarations from people who claimed, in varying tones of confidence, which in turn correlated exactly to how precarious their mental health was, that they had seen Manuela.

  There was the pathological liar Fornelli had mentioned to me who claimed he’d seen Manuela working as a prostitute on the outskirts of Foggia. Then there was a woman who noticed Manuela wandering absentmindedly through the aisles of a superstore in Bologna. There was a guy who swore he’d seen her in Brescia, flanked by two suspicious-looking men who spoke some Eastern European language. They had shoved Manuela into a car, which tore away, tires screeching.

  The Carabinieri noted that none of these statements appeared to possess even a shred of credibility. As I read, I thought to myself that I had rarely agreed so wholeheartedly with a police document.

  Also in the file were a number of anonymous letters that had been sent directly to the district attorney’s office. They spoke, variously, of the white slave trade, international conspiracies, Turkish and Israeli intelligence agencies, satanic cults and black masses. I forced myself to read them all, from start to finish, and I emerged from that experience exhausted, dispirited, and with absolutely nothing to show for it.

  Manuela had been sucked silently into a vacant and terrifying vacuum on a late-summer Sunday, and I could think of nothing more that might be done to keep alive the desperate hopes of her parents.

  I walked over to the fridge and poured myself another glass of wine. I looked back over the few notes I’d jotted down and decided they were useless.

  My nerves were on edge, and I seemed unable to control my thoughts. I wondered what the private investigators and police detectives from some of the many American crime novels I’d read over the years would have done in my situation. For instance, I tried to imagine what Matthew Scudder, or Harry Bosch, or Steve Carella would do if he were assigned to this case.

  The question was ridiculous, and yet, paradoxically, it helped me focus my thoughts.

  The investigator in a crime novel, without exception, would begin by talking to the policeman who conducted the investigation. They would ask him what ideas he might have developed, independently of what he’d written in his reports. Then they would contact the people who’d already been questioned and try to extract some detail that they’d overlooked, or forgotten, or failed to mention, or that simply hadn’t made it into the report.

  It was just then that I realized something. A couple of hours earlier, I had assumed that when I read the file, I wouldn’t find any new clues. And in fact, reading the file had only confirmed my suspicions. But I also assumed that I would then report my findings to Fornelli and the Ferraros, return their check, and get myself out of an assignment that I had neither the skills nor the resources to take on. It would be the only right and reasonable course of action. But in that two-hour period, for reasons I could only vaguely guess at and that I didn’t want to examine too closely, I had changed my mind.

  I told myself I’d give it a try. Nothing more. And the first thing I’d do would be to talk to the non-commissioned officer who had supervised the investigation, Inspector Navarra. I knew him. We were friends, and he would certainly be willing to tell me what he thought of the case, aside from what he’d written in his reports. Then I’d decide what to do next, what else to try.

  As I walked out onto the street, with a studied gesture I pulled up the collar of my raincoat, even though there was no reason to do so.

  People who read too much often do things that are completely unnecessary.

  9.

  On my way home, I decided to put in half an hour on my punching bag. The idea, as always, made me slightly giddy. I think it might be interesting for a skilled psychologist to spend some time studying my relationship with the heavy bag. Obviously, I punch it a lot. But before I get started, in the pauses between rounds, and especially afterward, perhaps while drinking a cold beer or a glass of wine, I talk to it.

  This began when Margherita left for New York, and it got more serious when she wrote to say that she wasn’t planning to come back to Italy. That letter—a genuine letter on paper, not an e-mail—certified what I already knew: It was over between us, and she now had another life, in another city, in another world. That left me with the crumbs of our old life, in our old city, in our old world. In the months that followed, what I talked about most of all to him—to the punching bag, I mean—was Margherita and the other women I’ve loved. Three in all.

  “You know, friend, what strikes me as especially sad?”

  “—”

  “I no longer remember the devastating feeling that I experienced, albeit differently, with Tiziana, Margherita, and Sara. I just can’t seem to remember it. I know I felt it, but I have to work to convince myself of that, because I have no memory of it. It’s gone.”

  Mister Bag swung from side to side, and I understood he wanted an explanation. I probably hadn’t described it well. What did I mean when I said that I couldn’t remember that devastating feeling?

  “Maybe you know that song by Fabrizio De André, ‘The Song of Lost Love.’ You remember that verse that goes, ‘Nothing’s left but a few halfhearted caresses and a little tenderness’?

  “—”

  “Okay, you don’t know it. Well, you might not recognize the words, but you’ve definitely heard the song. There was a time when I played it a lot. Yeah, I know, it’s a little pathetic. After all, you’re the only one I talk to about it. Anyway, I want to tell you something, but you have to promise to keep it to yourself.”

  “—”

  “You’re right, sorry. No one can keep a secret like you. You know how sometimes I feel like crying?”

  “—”

  “Sure, I’ll tell you why. Because I actually feel the need to talk about it. I feel like crying when I realize that the memory of the women I loved doesn’t make me suffer. The worst it does is give me a sort of vague, feeble, distant sadness. It’s so nothing. It’s like a puddle of stagnant water.”

  “—”

  “Okay, I admit, that’s not much of a metaphor. And you’re right, I get lost in my own thoughts and don’t do a good job of explaining things. The reason I feel like crying is that everything seems drab, silent. Even my pain. My so-called emotional life is like a silent movie. I know that you’re not exactly the kind of guy who delves into subtleties, but I’m sad, and I feel like crying, because I can’t manage to get in touch with that sadness. That healthy sadness, the kind that makes your temples throb, that makes you feel alive. Not this flabby, miserable, soft thing. You understand?”

  By this point in the conversation, Mister Bag was completely motionless. The last bit of swing from the punches he had so obligingly absorbed from his clearly unbalanced friend—me—had worn off, and he hung there, perfectly still. As if what I was telling him were so upsetting that it froze him. He was thinking, but it wasn’t his style to offer answers, opinions, or advice.

&
nbsp; Still, believe it or not, after those conversations, so rife with psychiatric pathology—and after throwing a lot of punches, of course—I always felt better, and sometimes I even felt perfectly fine.

  To tell the truth, Mister Bag is the perfect therapist. He listens and never interrupts. He never judges (at the very most, he might swing a little), and he never charges a fee. Plus, the transference problem is minimal: I feel a certain tenderness for him, but without any sexual implications. That’s why I’d never dream of replacing him. When he splits where I’ve been hitting particularly hard or insistently, I repair him with a length of duct tape. I really appreciate how it makes him look like a battle-scarred warrior, and I think that he’s grateful to me for not tossing him out and replacing him with some shiny new bag that has no significance.

  I walked into the apartment, loosening my tie, and the first thing I did was put on a CD that I had burned for myself with twenty or so songs of all kinds. Two minutes later, I had taken off my trousers and shirt (still wearing my boxers, just to be clear), taped up my hands, and put on my gloves, and I was punching the bag.

  I went for a first round of mild jabs, just a warm-up session. Light combinations of three or four punches with both hands, without follow-through. Jab, straight, left hook. Right hook, left hook, uppercut. Jab, jab, straight right. And so on, for the first three minutes, getting warmed up. Between rounds, I exchanged a few words with Mister Bag, but to tell the truth, that evening neither of us really felt much like talking. When I started the second round, I began putting a little more energy into my punches. The shuffle feature on my CD player brought up the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, which made me feel a lot like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

  Sometimes when I’m punching the heavy bag with the right music and the right level of focus, unexpected memories pop out of nowhere. Doors swing open to show me scenes, sounds, noises, voices, and even smells that I’d long forgotten.

  That evening, while I was pummeling Mister Bag, who patiently let me work on him, I remembered, as if I were screening a movie in my mind, my first fight as an amateur boxer, welterweight, classification novice.

  I was just sixteen, tall, skinny, and scared to death. My opponent was shorter and more muscular than I was, with an acne-scarred face and the expression of a murderer. Or at least, that’s what he looked like to me. I had decided to become a boxer precisely to help me overcome my fear of guys like him. In the interminable minutes before the bout began, I thought—among many other things—that clearly the treatment wasn’t working. My legs were shaking, my breathing was labored, and I felt as if my arms were paralyzed. I thought I’d never be able to raise my arms to defend myself, much less to throw a punch. The terror became so intense that I even considered faking illness—falling to the floor and pretending to faint—just to keep from having to fight.

  But when the bell rang, I stood up and walked out to fight. And that’s when a strange thing happened.

  His fists didn’t hurt me. They pummeled my helmet and especially my body, since he was shorter than I was, and he was doing everything he could to make up for it. With every punch he threw, he exhaled with a guttural grunt, as if he were trying to deliver the final haymaker. But his punches were slow, feeble, and harmless—and they didn’t hurt. I kept moving around him, trying to take advantage of my reach, and I kept tapping him with my left.

  In the third round, he got mad. Maybe his trainer told him he was losing the match, or maybe he figured it out on his own. In any case, when the bell rang he lunged at me furiously, frantically windmilling his arms. My right-cross counter-punch shot out and caught him in the head, without my quite realizing what I’d done. I still can’t remember it exactly. What I do remember—or more likely what I think I remember—is a sort of film still, an image from the moment a fraction of a second after the punch connected and before he dropped to the canvas, in just as sprawling and disorderly a fashion as he had come windmilling and lunging toward me in the first place.

  In amateur boxing, it’s a rare thing to knock down your opponent, and a knockout is even rarer. It’s an event, and everyone knows it. When I saw my opponent flat on his back, a rush of heat and savage joy rose from my hips all the way to the nape of my neck.

  The referee ordered me into my corner, and he began the count. The other guy got to his feet almost immediately, raising both gloves to show that he could continue the fight. And in fact, the fight resumed, but it was already over. At that point, I had an unbeatable lead, and if my acne-scarred opponent wanted to win, he was going to have to knock me out for the full count. He wasn’t up to that. I kept on circling around him, easily staying out of reach of his lunges and attacks, which were increasingly feeble and frantic, and I kept tapping him with my left until the bell rang, ending the round and the match.

  That night, I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I was still a child and that was why I knew, as I would at few other times in my life, what it meant to feel like a man.

  I stopped punching. I stood there, face-to-face with Mister Bag, trying to regain control of my breathing, feeling the violent throbbing in my temples, as a desperate, fondness for the man-child I’d been, lying awake in the darkness, wrapped in my blanket, looking forward to what was yet to come, swept over me.

  When the swaying of the bag and my own breathing slowed, I shook myself out of that trance.

  Nico and the Velvet Underground were singing “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

  “Okay, Mister Bag, I’m going to go take a shower and then I’m going to sleep. I hope. Anyway, it’s always a pleasure to spend a little time with you.”

  He nodded, swinging, understanding. He loved me, too, in spite of everything.

  10.

  Inspector Navarra is a likable guy. He doesn’t particularly look like a policeman, and he looks even less like a military man. He has the face of a slightly overweight kid. He’s certainly not someone you’d imagine kicking in doors, gun in hand, to round up a ring of drug dealers, or interrogating suspects and slapping them around. His wife is an engineer who works as a researcher at National Research Council. He met her in college when he was studying engineering himself. Then he took the civil service exam to become a non-commissioned Carabinieri officer, passed, and stopped his university studies. He has three children, a dog, a hint of melancholy in his eyes, and a hobby that he loves: making paper airplanes.

  That sounds like a hobby for little kids, like a way of passing the time in a doctor’s waiting room.

  But not the way he does it. For every plane he builds, he spends days developing rough sketches, and then refining the blueprints, and then building prototypes and smoothing the rough edges, until the airplane flies just the way he wants. And when I say “flies,” I mean it in the truest sense of the word. Long, soaring flights, incredibly long, as if there were an engine and a pilot in the plane, or as if the plane were alive. As a way of thanking me for some legal advice I once gave his sister, he gave me one of his airplanes. I still have it, and I have to say it’s one of the few objects with which I’d really hate to part.

  I had Navarra’s cell phone number, so the following morning I gave him a call.

  “Inspector Navarra, it’s Counselor Guerrieri.”

  “Hello, counselor, how are you doing? Do you still have the paper plane I gave you?”

  “Of course I do. From time to time I look at it and wonder how you manage to create something like that out of pieces of paper.”

  “Is there something I can help you with?” he asked.

  “Yes, there is. I’d like to talk to you for half an hour. Could we meet somewhere?”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The disappearance of Manuela Ferraro. Her parents came to see me a few days ago and I’ve read the file. I’d like to discuss it with you if you have a minute.”

  “Are you going to court today?”

  “I don’t have any hearings, but if you’re going to be in court, we could meet there.”

  �
��If you’re coming just to talk to me, then don’t go to the trouble. Let’s do it this way: I’ll go to my hearing, I’ll ask if I can testify first thing, and when I’m done I’ll give you a call and then I’ll drop by your office.”

  I told him I didn’t want to impose on him; he replied that it was a pleasure for him to come and see me. He said that he liked me, which he couldn’t say for most of my colleagues, and that, in his opinion, I should have been a prosecutor. He liked the way I had argued on behalf of the plaintiff in a trial for usury for which he’d conducted the police investigations. He said that if it had been up to the prosecutor, the bastard who was on trial would have gotten off scot-free. If the judges sentenced that band of loan sharks to hard prison time, it was to my credit, he said. It would be a pleasure to come see me, he said again.

  He called me earlier than I expected. His trial had been adjourned because of a failure to serve certain papers, so he’d been able to free himself up almost immediately. Twenty minutes later, he was sitting across from me.

  “Weren’t you in a different office until recently?”

  “Yes, we moved four months ago.”

  “It looks sort of American. Nice. I’d like to make some changes, too. But it’s not so easy if you’re a Carabiniere. You’ve got a fixed income, and you can’t predict your schedule. I was thinking of going back to college.”

  “You’d like to study engineering again?”

  He looked at me in astonishment.

  “Good memory. But no, not engineering. I don’t think I could get up to speed, especially in my spare time. I was thinking of literature, or philosophy. But maybe that’s a pipe dream. It’s just that once you pass age forty, you start to ask yourself some hard questions about the meaning of what you’re doing, and especially about time passing, which it seems to do more and more quickly.”