“Let me start by thanking you for agreeing to come in. I believe that Signora Ferraro already explained why I wanted to talk with you.”
“Yes, she told me that you’re doing some kind of investigation into Manuela’s disappearance.”
Before I could catch myself, a sensation of intensely pure and completely idiotic vanity swept through me. If I was doing “some kind of investigation,” then you might say I was some kind of investigator.
Or perhaps—I thought, as I regained control—it might be more accurate to say I was some kind of asshole.
“Let’s just say that we’re going over the documents from the investigation that the Carabinieri did to see whether, perhaps, they might have missed some minor detail that might suggest a new theory about what happened to Manuela.”
“You’re a lawyer, though, right?”
“Yes, I’m a lawyer.”
“I didn’t think that lawyers did … well, that lawyers did that kind of thing. Like a private investigator, right?”
“Yes and no. It depends on the circumstances. What are you studying, Anita?”
“I’m about to graduate with a degree in communications.”
“Ah. Are you planning to be a journalist?”
“No, I’d like to open a bookstore, though it’s a tough business. I think I’ll get a master’s degree, and then I’ll work in a bookstore chain for a few years. Maybe somewhere outside of Italy. Someplace like Barnes & Noble, or Borders.”
There’s no faster way to win me over than to say you want to be a bookseller. When I was a boy, I sometimes thought I’d like to run a bookstore. It was mainly because I had a romantic and completely unrealistic idea of what that job entailed; in my vision, it would consist mostly of spending my days reading any book I wanted for free. Oh, from time to time, I’d have to stop reading to wait on someone, but customers wouldn’t hang around, probably because they wouldn’t want to interrupt me. I figured that if I were a bookseller, or perhaps a librarian, I would have lots of time to write my novels, especially on long spring afternoons, when the sun’s rays would slant in low through the shop windows—something along the line of City Lights Books—landing on the tables, the bookshelves, and, of course, the books.
“Good idea. When I was a kid, I thought it would be nice to run a bookstore. To get back to your question: You’re right, as a rule investigations are done for the defense by private detectives, but in this specific case, Manuela’s family wanted a lawyer to do it—someone with expertise in the judicial process.”
I spoke as if this were something I did all the time. She nodded her head, and her expression suggested she was happy with the answer I’d given her. To be exact: happy that she’d asked the question and happy with the way I’d answered her, treating her respectfully. I thought this was a good starting point, and decided to ask her to tell me her story.
“All right, let me start by asking you to tell me what you remember about that Sunday afternoon.”
“I told the Carabinieri everything I remember.”
“No, sorry. Don’t think about what you told the Carabinieri. In fact, I’d like you to try to forget everything you said in the Carabinieri station, when and how the interview was conducted—everything. As far as you are able, I’d like you to tell me what happened as if it were the first time, thinking visually if you can. Which is to say: tell me about going to the trulli, why you went, who you knew there. Whatever pops into your head. Just let go of the story you told the Carabinieri.”
I wasn’t doing some cop act. I’d studied these techniques while preparing to do crucial questioning in the courtroom during a trial.
Once we’ve told a story about something that happened—especially if we have told that story in a formal context, before a judge or to a detective, with a written, signed statement—and we are asked to tell it again, we tend to reiterate the first narrative rather than evoking direct memories of the actual experience. This mechanism only becomes more firmly cemented with each successive repetition and, in the end, what happens is that we no longer remember the actual events, but instead our account of the events. Naturally, this mechanism makes it increasingly difficult to recover details that we overlooked the first time. Details that may seem insignificant, but can prove to be crucial. In order to succeed in recovering these details, it is necessary to release the person being questioned from the memory of the earlier account, to bring the person back to the actual memory of the events experienced. But of course that doesn’t always work.
I didn’t go into this whole explanation with Anita, but she seemed to understand that there was a certain logic behind my request. So she sat in silence for a few moments, as if she were concentrating before doing what I’d asked. Then she began.
“I didn’t know Manuela, that is, I only met her that weekend at the trulli.”
“Had you been to the trulli before?”
“Yeah, lots of times. It’s an odd place. All sorts of people wind up there. Maybe you’ve been there, at some point.”
I told her that I’d never been, and she explained to me that it was a large compound of trulli that a group of friends rents and where lots of people come out to spend time, all summer long. There was enough room, if everyone squeezed in, for maybe thirty people to sleep there. There were parties and all kinds of happenings every night. It was a sort of commune for well-to-do young people, generally left-wing young people, on the radical-chic side of things.
“That Sunday afternoon, I had to go to Ostuni to meet a girlfriend and Manuela asked if I’d give her a ride. She had to get back to Bari and the people she’d come with wanted to stay at the trulli that night.”
“Do you remember who came with Manuela?”
“I remember their faces. I don’t know their names.”
The names of the young people were in the file. Their statements had been so insignificant that I hadn’t even bothered to include them in the list of people to interview.
“Before you tell me about the car ride that Sunday afternoon, I’d like you to talk to me about life at the trulli.”
“What do you mean?”
“What was going on, exactly? People coming, people leaving, if you noticed any unusual people, for instance, who might have been talking to Manuela. I don’t know, someone drinking, maybe someone smoking a joint.”
I felt a little awkward as I pronounced that last phrase. I said “smoking a joint” because it struck me that using legal terminology such as, “Did you observe the consumption of narcotics?” would just interfere with our ability to communicate. Instead, I realized that I’d spoken as if I were a grownup clumsily trying to talk hip like the kids, and it made me deeply uncomfortable. In any case, I thought I saw a momentary evasiveness come into Anita’s gaze, a sudden loss of eye contact, as if the question about whether joints were being smoked upset her a little. But it was a passing moment, and I told myself that maybe there was nothing to it.
At the trulli, life began late in the morning, though a small group woke up very early, did tai chi, and then went to the beach when there was still virtually no one else there. Around one o’clock, at lunch, some drank espresso and cappuccinos while others sipped their first aperitifs—a Spritz or a Negroni, generally speaking, she told me, as if the information were crucial. Big, informal meals of pasta, drinking, music, people coming and going. Down to the beach in the afternoon, where they’d stay until sunset, happy hour on the beach, with music and more Negronis and Spritzes, then back to the trulli or to a restaurant for dinner in one of the surrounding towns: Cisternino, Martina Franca, Alberobello, Locorotondo, Ceglie, or, of course, Ostuni.
These were rituals I knew all too well, because I had taken part in them myself until just a few years ago. And yet, listening as this young woman—twenty years younger than I—described them, they seemed a world away. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation.
“You said that you were a fairly frequent guest at those trulli.”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice anyone in particular, that weekend? Or was it different in some way from what usually happened?”
“No, I don’t think so. There were some English kids, but nothing happened that seemed out of the ordinary.”
“Naturally, at a certain point, a few people smoked pot, right?”
As I expected (and for that matter, as had just happened), the mention of marijuana made her uneasy.
“I’m not sure … I mean, maybe, but …”
“Listen, Anita. Let me explain something to you, before we go any further. Something important. I’m not with the police, and I’m not with the district attorney.”
I paused to make sure she understood what I was saying.
“That means that it’s not my job to investigate crimes and prosecute the people who commit them. I don’t care in the slightest if people at the trulli smoked themselves silly, got drunk, or ingested substances of some kind. Or, rather, I care only if that information can help me find out something about Manuela’s disappearance. You have nothing to worry about. This conversation is, and will remain, completely confidential. For that matter, there’s probably no connection between someone smoking a little grass and Manuela’s disappearance. But I’m feeling my way in the dark here, and the slightest scrap of information could be helpful, in theory. The only way I can know that is if I’m able to evaluate the information for myself. Is that clear?”
Anita didn’t say anything right away. She scratched an eyebrow, then smoothed it with her middle finger. She heaved a sigh.
“There were some drugs out there.”
“What kind of drugs?” I asked cautiously, afraid that at this point in the conversation any questions I asked might cause her to stop talking, instead of encouraging her to say more.
“I only saw joints. But I think there were other drugs.”
“Cocaine?”
“You promised me this conversation would be confidential.”
“Absolutely confidential. You don’t have a thing to worry about. No one will ever know you told me any of this.”
“Cocaine, yes. And some acid. But like I said, I never saw it, I never touched it.”
I felt a triumphant thrill of excitement—as if the objective of my investigation had been to discover whether in the trulli of the village of Saint Such-and-Such there were a bunch of bored kids who were ingesting various grades of psychotropic substances, and therefore my mission was accomplished.
“Do you know whether Manuela ever used drugs?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“No, you mean that she didn’t use narcotics, or no, you don’t know whether she did?”
“No, I don’t know. We met for the first time Saturday night, even though we’d probably crossed paths earlier, at the beach at Torre Canne, but at the trulli, too, or in Bari. I’d seen her face before, but we met, we spoke for the first time that Saturday night.”
“How did Manuela happen to ask you for a ride?”
“The evening … well really, the night before, when the party was already over and those who weren’t sleeping at the trulli had already left, there were five or six of us left talking, one or two were smoking cigarettes. It was our last conversation before going to sleep. It was past three, a good bit past three. At some point, Manuela asked if anyone was going back to Bari the next afternoon, because she needed a ride.”
“And nobody was going back to Bari?”
“No one who was still awake. I said I needed to go to Ostuni on Sunday afternoon. If she wanted, I’d be glad to give her a ride to the station, and from there she could catch a train to Bari.”
“And Manuela accepted immediately.”
“She said that if she hadn’t found a ride all the way back to Bari by then, she’d come with me.”
“And evidently she couldn’t find a ride?”
“We ran into each other the next morning, around noon. There were definitely people going back to Bari that night, but late. She wanted to get back early, in the afternoon, so she told me she’d come with me to Ostuni and then she’d catch a train.”
“Did she say she had to get back in the afternoon? Did she have something to do, something that meant she had to get back before evening?”
“She didn’t say that.”
“But you had the impression that was it.”
“Yes, it did seem as if there was some specific reason she needed to get back before evening.”
“But she didn’t tell you what the reason was?”
“No. We agreed to meet around four o’clock and then she headed off. I don’t know what she did between then and when we met up for the drive.”
I nodded, doing my best to think if I had any other possible questions, before continuing on to her account of the drive from the trulli to Ostuni. I couldn’t think of anything.
“All right. Shall we talk about what happened after that, in the afternoon?”
“Sure, though there really isn’t much to say. She had a bag and she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. We got in the car, we talked about this and that.”
“What did you talk about?”
“First of all, we didn’t talk much, because for most of the drive, she was fooling around with her cell phone.…”
“You said, ‘fooling around.’ Did she talk to someone or receive texts or what?”
“I already told the Carabinieri that I don’t think she talked to anyone. Probably she was texting. At a certain point, the phone made a sound, and I thought it might be a message.”
“Why did you think it might have been a message?”
“Because I believe it only made a single sound. That is, I don’t think the cell phone went on ringing. Like an alert. It may have been a strange sound, but I can’t explain exactly what I mean by that. I just remember something … unusual, that’s all.”
I was about to ask more, and then I realized that pressing her on this point was ridiculous. I had Manuela’s phone records, so there was no point trying to push Salvemini to recover her shreds of memory. Completely unnecessary. Manuela’s communications, that afternoon, would be listed in detail on her phone records.
“Okay. You said that you didn’t talk much. But what did you talk about?”
“Nothing important. ‘What are you studying? What did you do this summer?’ That kind of thing, but certainly nothing important.”
“How long did it take you to get to the station in Ostuni?”
“About twenty minutes. That time on a Sunday afternoon, everyone’s still at the beach, so there’s no traffic.”
“Did Manuela make any particular impression on you?”
Anita didn’t answer right away. She made the same motion she had before—by now, it struck me as a nervous tic of some kind—scratching her eyebrow and then smoothing it with her middle finger.
“Any particular impression? I couldn’t say. Maybe she seemed, how to put it, kind of high-strung.”
“You mean that she seemed irritable in the car?”
“No, it wasn’t that. The night before, and the next morning, when we agreed to drive to Ostuni together, and in the car, too, she seemed to me … I don’t know how to put this. She was just a little high-strung, I can’t think of another word for it.”
“Well, did she seem worried about something?”
“No, no. Not worried. It’s just that she didn’t strike me as an easygoing person.”
“Could you describe any specific gesture that she made that might have given you that impression?”
Another pause to think.
“No. I couldn’t indicate any specific gesture. But she was a little, how to put this … a little speedy, that’s it.”
I took a few seconds to make a mental note of this.
“How did you say good-bye?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you say, let’s get together, let’s have dinner sometime? I don’t know, did you exchange phone numbers?”
“No, we just said good-bye,
the way you do. Thanks, bye, and so on. We didn’t exchange phone numbers.”
“When did you find out that Manuela had disappeared?”
“A few days later, when the Carabinieri called me in for an interview.”
I really couldn’t think of anything else to ask. The fact that the drug use at the trulli had come out had given me a false sense of triumph, in part because no one had told the Carabinieri about it. In reality, though, aside from that detail—which really wasn’t of any importance as far as I was concerned—nothing new had emerged. And of course that was frustrating. I had the feeling that I was trying to climb up a smooth glass wall.
I made one last attempt.
“While you were in the car together, did either of you mention the fact that stuff was circulating at the trulli, drugs, that is, as you mentioned before?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“And you don’t know whether Manuela used drugs.”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
There really wasn’t anything else to say. The time had come to say good-bye, and that’s when I remembered the suggestion that Navarra had given me. I pulled one of my business cards out of my desk drawer, wrote my cell phone number on it, and handed it to her.
“It’s possible, in fact it’s very likely, that something else will come to mind—a detail, some minor thing that you’ve overlooked. That’s the most normal thing in the world. If, and when, this happens, please call me. Call me here at my office, or on my cell phone. Call me even if you remember a detail that strikes you as irrelevant. Sometimes details that seem unimportant turn out to be key.”
We stood up, but she continued looking at me, across the desk, as if she wanted to say something else, but couldn’t think of the words, or was uncomfortable.
“Don’t worry about the things you told me. Our conversation was completely confidential. It’s as if you never said a thing.”
Her expression relaxed. She half-smiled and told me that if anything else occurred to her, any detail at all, she’d certainly call me.
I shook her hand, I thanked her, and I walked her to the door.
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