Temporary Perfections

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  20.

  At that point, I was faced with the problem of how to ask Fornelli for a picture of Cantalupi, and it struck me as absurdly challenging.

  The minute I asked him for it, he, very reasonably, would ask me why I wanted it. I didn’t feel like answering that question, because I didn’t want to explain what I was doing. Not right now, anyway. Maybe I was embarrassed to tell him that I’d started digging around in the world of drug dealers, where I obviously had a number of useful contacts. Maybe I was afraid that my ambitions as a would-be private investigator might blow up in my face with an actionable defamation of someone—Cantalupi—who might have absolutely nothing to do with Manuela’s disappearance or with dealing drugs. Or maybe I was uncomfortable with the idea that Fornelli might speak to Manuela’s parents and, in order to explain his request, tell them that there was good news—that Guerrieri, that old bloodhound, was on someone’s trail. That he might get their hopes up for no good reason. Or maybe it was much simpler. Maybe I just didn’t want Quintavalle to take a look at the photograph and say that he had no idea who the guy was, bringing a sudden end to my brilliant investigative lead.

  So I let the weekend go by without calling him.

  On Monday, I was returning to my office after a hearing that had dragged on longer than expected. It was too late for lunch but also too early for my first appointment, so I went over to the Feltrinelli bookshop, had a cappuccino, and bought a book. It was called The Mysteries of Bari, and the flap copy promised that the book revealed a number of the most incredible urban legends of Bari, with descriptions of the unsettling historic events that had engendered those legends.

  As I walked out of the bookstore, planning to loaf around for another half an hour or so, I saw Signore Ferraro, Manuela’s father, coming toward me.

  He was walking briskly, looking straight ahead, directly at me, and for a moment I thought he was coming to tell me something. I put on the expression you use to say hello to someone, and the muscles in my right arm tensed in preparation for a handshake.

  But Ferraro literally looked right through me, and a few seconds later he strode past me, without seeing me. His expression—which appeared vigilant but in reality was distracted, remote—gave me the shivers.

  I turned and watched him for a few seconds and then, almost against my will, I began to follow him.

  At first I followed him cautiously, but before long I saw that he wasn’t paying the slightest attention to his surroundings. He never looked behind him, and he never looked to either side. He walked at a good pace, and the gaze that had pierced me without seeing me was directed straight ahead, into the void. Or maybe somewhere even worse.

  We reached Via Sparano and he turned right, toward the train station.

  I didn’t even bother to ask myself just what I thought I was doing, or why. I was in the throes of a feverish instinct that drove me to follow him, without thinking about it.

  Once I was sure that he wouldn’t have noticed me even if I had jumped in front of him, right into his path—he would simply have walked around me and continued on his way—I became more daring and started following right behind him, practically walking at his side, just a couple of yards away from him.

  Someone watching the scene from a certain distance might even have thought that we were walking together.

  As we walked, a remarkable thing happened. I felt as if I could envision the entire scene—including myself—from an outside vantage point. It was a strange, dissociated vision, as if I were standing on a balcony on the second or third floor of a building behind us.

  I didn’t like what I saw. Sometimes you see a photograph that has been manipulated on a computer: Everything is black and white, but in the middle there’s a patch of color—an object, a detail, or a person. The scene I was looking at was the other way around. Everything was normal, in full color, except for a weird entity in the middle, in black-and-white, almost glowing, and deeply sad. That entity was Manuela’s father.

  It only lasted for a few seconds, but it made the blood run ice-cold in my veins, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.

  We walked through the gardens of Piazza Umberto, passed the university, and reached Piazza Moro. There he stopped for a moment near the fountain, downwind of it, and it struck me that he wanted the spray to splash him. Then he continued past the fountain, walked into the station, strode confidently over to the underpass, descended the steps, walked around a panhandler, and then went up the stairs to Track 5.

  There were people waiting all along the platform. I looked up at the display panels to see which train they were waiting for. Then I knew for sure what I had already guessed to be true.

  Ferraro sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. I felt an urge to go over to him and ask for a cigarette so we could smoke together. He had a pack of Camels, and I really would have loved to smoke a Camel right then, to burn—along with the tobacco and the cigarette paper—the viscous, choking sadness that had infected me like a disease.

  Then I thought: I shouldn’t be here at all. It’s not nice to spy on people in the best of circumstances, but peering into the inner recesses of a human being driven mad with grief is cruel and dangerous. Grief can be contagious. Still, I stayed there. I stood, in my gray suit holding my lawyer’s briefcase, and I waited for the train from Lecce, Brindisi, Ostuni, and Monopoli to pull into the station. I waited for Signore Ferraro to walk the length of the platform, examining, one by one, each of the passengers getting off the train. I waited for the doors to close and the train to pull back out of the station, and I had to restrain myself from following him again when he walked back into the yawning shadow of the steps down to the underpass and vanished.

  When I emerged from the train station onto the piazza, I turned my cell phone back on. I’d turned it off during the hearing and then forgotten about it. Subconscious self-defense, I guess.

  There were a lot of calls and quite a few text messages. One of the text messages read

  Yr tel always off i talked to nicoletta call me & i’ll tell u all abt it luv caterina.

  21.

  I called her back immediately, doing my best to ignore the effect that the “luv” at the end of the message was having on me.

  “It’s Guido Guerrieri, I got your message.…”

  “I called and called but your phone is always off.”

  It was a subtle thing, but she had used the familiar Italian tu form. She’d addressed me formally back in the office.

  “Well, yes, I was in court for a hearing and I turned it off. Did you want to tell me something?”

  “Yes, I managed to talk to Nicoletta.”

  “Great, did you ask if she’s willing to meet with me?”

  “I had to call her more than once. At first, she said she didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. She was confused and worried and said she didn’t want to get involved.”

  “Involved in what? I only want to ask her a few questions.”

  “That’s what I told her. But I kept after her, and in the end I got her to agree to meet with you.”

  “Thank you. So what do I do next?”

  “She said that she’s only willing to talk to you if I come, too.”

  I said nothing for a few seconds.

  “I told her there’s nothing to worry about, that you only want to ask her a few questions about Manuela. But she was nervous about it, so I told her that if she wanted, I could come with you. I thought that might reassure her.”

  “So, now what should we do?”

  “Now we should go to Rome together and meet with her.”

  That answer had a truly schizophrenic effect on me: annoyance at her trespassing on my professional territory, a slight and mounting excitement at the almost explicit seductiveness in Caterina’s words and voice. I didn’t know what to say, and as I usually do in situations of this kind, I tried to stall.

  “Fine. Do you mind dropping by my office this
evening so we can talk it over?”

  “What time?”

  “If it’s all the same to you, later is better.”

  “What if I come at 8:30?”

  “8:30 would be perfect. So, see you later, thanks.”

  “See you later.”

  The conversation was over, but I stood there, looking down at the cell phone in my hand. A number of thoughts ran through my mind, and some of them were both unprofessional and unlawful. I felt embarrassed, and I knew that I could slip very quickly from the merely embarrassing to the deeply ridiculous. I quickly stuffed my cell phone into my pocket, with a briskness that verged on rage, and I hurried back to my office.

  The afternoon was filled with appointments and things to do, and it went by quickly. The next day Consuelo’s first trial as sole defense counsel was scheduled in a court in the surrounding province. She’d asked me to go over the case with her.

  It was a trial for robbery involving violence after the fact. Three high school students, two of them underage and one an adult, had stolen cookies, chocolate bars, and soft drinks from a supermarket. The security guard spotted them and managed to stop one of them. The other two came back to help their friend, and a fairly violent fight broke out. The kids managed to escape, but plenty of people had seen it all, and in just a few hours the Carabinieri had identified them. The two kids who were under eighteen at the time had been tried as minors in juvenile court. The client Consuelo and I were representing was the adult. He’d only come to see us after he’d already been indicted, when it was already too late to plea-bargain—definitely the best approach in a case of this sort. The defense theory that we had all agreed upon was to put all the blame for the assault on the security guard on one of the two minors—he had already gotten off with a judicial pardon, and therefore no longer risked any legal consequences. Let me point out, by the way, that it may even have been true, since one of the two minors was a rugby player who tipped the scales at well over two hundred pounds.

  The following day, I was scheduled to attend a hearing at the appeals court in Lecce, so we decided that the case of the cookie thieves would be Consuelo’s first solo trial.

  While she was summarizing her notes for the following day, my concentration faltered and I drifted away. As so often happens to me, I pursued a memory.

  We were a group of boys, high school freshmen, on a winter afternoon. We roamed aimlessly around the city with nothing to do, bored in a way that is possible only when you have all the time in the world.

  At a certain point, one of us—I think his name was Beppe—said that his parents were out of town, and that we could go to his house to listen to music and maybe make prank phone calls. Someone else said that’d be great, but first we needed to get something to eat and something to drink.

  “Let’s go shoplift stuff from the supermarket,” said a third kid.

  No objections were raised; in fact, the suggestion was met with an enthusiastic response. At last, an exciting development during that long afternoon of boredom. I had never stolen anything in my life, though I knew that many of my friends did it. This was the first time I’d been involved in anything of the sort. I didn’t want to do it, but I was too scared to say anything. I didn’t want to prove my friends right when they said that if I had an Indian warrior name, it would be He Who Shits in His Pants.

  So I went along with them, though as we got closer to the supermarket we had selected for our raid I felt a growing disquiet, comprised of equal measures of fear that something might go wrong and shame over what we were about to do.

  Things only got worse once we were inside the supermarket. My friends scattered down the aisles and began filling pants, jackets, and even knee socks with merchandise. They moved around frenetically, like crazed ants, grabbing groceries and concealing them in their clothing with complete nonchalance. They didn’t even bother to look around to make sure they weren’t being watched.

  While they worked busily, I stood motionless, staring at—I’m just inventing a detail here—the shelves of the candy and snack section. I picked up a bag of malted chocolate bars and hefted it, looking furtively to my right and then to my left. There was no one in sight, and I told myself that this was the perfect moment to slip the bag down my pants and be done with it. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I kept thinking that in the exact split second I did, someone would come around the corner from one direction or the other, they’d see me, they’d sound the alarm, the security guards would come running, and before long I’d be handcuffed, waiting to be shipped off to the juvenile detention center, fervently hoping the ground would open up and swallow me in a chasm of humiliation and shame.

  I can’t say how long we stayed in that supermarket. After a while, Beppe came over to where I stood staring intently—with autistic focus—at a package of jam tarts. In a frantic tone of voice he told me that we had to hurry up and leave the store before things got out of hand. He explained that one member of our group, Lino, was going too far, just as he had on other occasions. He’d stuffed way too much food into his clothes, and there was a good chance he’d be caught and then we’d all be fucked. His exact words. That’s when I had a clever and cowardly idea.

  “Hey, Beppe, let’s do this: I’ll buy something, and while I’m paying, I’ll distract the checkout girl, so you guys can just stroll out without any problems.”

  He looked at me for a few seconds with a puzzled expression on his face. He was trying to figure it out. Was I a shrewd son of a bitch or—as must have seemed far more likely—a complete pussy who was trying to pull one over on his friends? He probably couldn’t come up with a clear answer, but there was no more time to waste.

  “Okay, I’ll tell the other guys. In a couple of minutes, you go to the cash register and while you pay, we’ll walk out. Then we’ll meet up back at my house.”

  I felt an enormous wave of relief. I’d found the perfect solution: I wouldn’t come off as an incompetent fuck-up (a description that my friends had applied to me more than once, and with good reason), yet I was taking practically no risk, and I wasn’t committing a crime—or so I thought at the time. At that age, I still hadn’t grasped the concept of being an accomplice to a crime, much less the fundamental principals of aiding and abetting someone in the commission of a crime.

  Thirty minutes later, we were all at Beppe’s house, and the dining room table was literally covered with cookies, cans of Coca-Cola, fruit juice cartons, chocolate bars, hard candies, snack cakes, cheese packs, and even a couple of salamis. In the middle of that cornucopia of junk food, solitary and pathetic, was the chocolate bar with puffed rice that I had bought and paid for with my own money.

  I guess it was all pretty ridiculous, but back then I had a hard time seeing the fun in it. Once I got over my sense of relief, I was stuck facing the unpleasant truth: I’d abetted a theft, and I was just as much a thief as the others, just a much more cowardly one.

  The other boys were eating, drinking, and recalling their daring deeds. I was terrified that someone might bring up my role in the raid and figure out my underlying motivations. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I soon became too uncomfortable to stay. I invented an excuse that no one cared about anyway and left with my tail between my legs. I left the chocolate bar I’d bought on the dining room table.

  “Guido, are you listening to me?”

  “I’m sorry, Consuelo, I just got distracted. I remembered something I had forgotten about and …”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “You seemed a little spaced out.”

  “It happens to me from time to time. Though lately it’s been happening a little more often, I have to admit.”

  She said nothing. It seemed as if she were trying to find the words or work up the courage to ask a question but then couldn’t.

  “Nothing to worry about, in any case. You can ask Maria Teresa. Every so often I seem like I’ve lost it, but I’m harmless.”

 
More or less.

  22.

  I gave no further signs of being mentally unbalanced. We finished going over the file, and Consuelo went back to her office. A short while later, a little earlier than we had agreed, Caterina arrived. Pasquale poked his head into my office and asked if he should send in the young lady now or have her wait until the time scheduled for her appointment. I told him to send her in, of course, even though her failure to be punctual annoyed me ever so slightly.

  “I’m a little early. I can wait. By the way, I realized that I”—she hemmed and hawed here, uncertain whether to stick with the informal tu or go back to the stiff formal lei—“used the informal with you on the phone,” she said, as she made herself comfortable in the seat across from my desk. “Maybe that was overly familiar.”

  “No worries. I’m done with what I was working on, and be as familiar as you like.”

  No worries? Listen to yourself, Guerrieri. Have you lost your mind? After “no worries,” there are just three more steps—“just a sec,” “irregardless,” and “you and I” as the object of a transitive verb. After that, you’re well on your way down the road to hell that’s paved with slipshod grammar, where you’ll end up in the infernal circle of the murderers of language.

  “I had a couple of errands to run, and I got them done earlier than I expected, so I thought I’d drop by. If you were still busy, I figured I could just wait.”

  I nodded, forcing myself to look at her face and not at the white, menswear-style shirt, extensively unbuttoned, that she was wearing under a black leather jacket. I am inclined to imagine that my expression was not the most intelligent.

  “So you told me on the phone that Nicoletta didn’t want to get involved. Is that really how she put it?”

  “Yes, that’s what she said. She was pretty worked up.”