Temporary Perfections

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  An absurd thought—but it set a chain of other thoughts in motion, including the idea of just dropping everything. For a few minutes, in fact, I thought that was what I’d do. I’d forget what I’d figured out. For those few minutes, I experienced a feeling of complete mastery, a perfect, unstable equilibrium. The kind of perfection that belongs only to things that are temporary, destined to end shortly.

  I remembered a holiday road trip in France, many years earlier, with Sara and some friends. We arrived in Biarritz and fell in love with the beach town’s timeless atmosphere, so we decided to stay. That was where I first took a few surfing lessons. After trying countless times, I finally managed to stand up on the board and ride a wave for three, maybe four seconds. In that instant I understood why surfers—real surfers—are obsessed, why the only thing they care about is getting up on a wave and riding it for as long as possible. To hell with everything else. Nothing could be more perfect than that temporary experience.

  As I sat listening to the sound of Caterina’s voice and savoring the sweet and salty taste of the last few sea urchins, I felt as if I were on a surfboard, riding the wave of time, for an endless, perfect instant.

  I wondered what it would be like to remember that moment. That’s when I fell off the wave and remembered why I was there.

  Soon after that, we got up from the table.

  “What have you decided to do next?” she asked, as we were walking toward the car.

  “About what?”

  “About your investigation. You mentioned that you wanted to show pictures of Michele to a drug dealer.”

  “Oh, right. I was thinking of doing that, but I’m still trying to figure everything out. Turns out, it might not be necessary. I thought of something else.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s get in the car and I’ll tell you about it.”

  The car was parked facing the beach, in a gravel lot that’s always packed with cars in the summer. That afternoon, it was deserted.

  “First I want to smoke a cigarette,” she said, pulling her colorful cigarette case out of her purse.

  “You can smoke in the car, if you want.”

  “No, I hate the smell of cigarette smoke in my own car, so I can only imagine how gross it must be for someone who doesn’t even smoke.”

  I was about to tell her that I’d been a smoker for years, and that I hated the smell of smoke in the car, too, even back then. Then I decided that the time had come to deal with things.

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “Go on,” she said, exhaling her first drag of smoke.

  “As far as you know, did Manuela have two cell phones?”

  35.

  The smoke went down the wrong way and she coughed violently, in shock and confusion. As if she were in a bad play.

  “What do you mean, two cell phones?”

  “Did Manuela just have one cell phone, or did she have more than one?”

  “I … I think she only had one. Why do you want to know?”

  “Are you sure? Think carefully.”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  Now her voice took on a note of impatience and grew almost aggressive.

  “I was told that Manuela may have had two phones, and I thought you’d probably know.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “What does that matter? Do you know whether or not she had two phone numbers?”

  “I don’t know. I only called her on one number.”

  “Do you know that number by heart?”

  “No, why would I? It was saved in my cell phone. I didn’t need to memorize it.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Have what?”

  “Manuela’s phone number, saved.”

  She stared at me, wide-eyed. She wasn’t sure what was happening, but she knew it wasn’t good. She decided to get angry.

  “Can I ask what the fuck you’re trying to find out? What the fuck is the meaning of these questions?”

  “Have you gotten a new cell phone, since Manuela’s disappearance?”

  “No. Could you tell me …”

  “Did you erase Manuela from your phone?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Can I take look at the contacts saved in your cell phone?”

  She looked at me with an incredulous expression that rapidly deteriorated into a grimace of rage as she flicked what was left of her cigarette onto the ground.

  “Fuck you. Unlock this car, get in, and drive me home.”

  I punched the remote door lock with my thumb, and the doors clicked open, with a soft and inevitable thunk. She pulled the door open and got in the car immediately. I got in and sat next to her a few seconds later, but I wished I were somewhere else. Somewhere far away.

  For a minute, or maybe longer, neither of us spoke.

  “May I ask why you’re not starting the car?”

  “I need you to tell me about Manuela’s second cell phone.”

  “And I need you to leave me alone and take me home. I’m not going to tell you a fucking thing.”

  “If you want me to, I’ll take you home, but the minute I drop you off I have to go to the Carabinieri, you understand that, right?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you can jump off a tall building. That might be the best thing you could do.”

  Her voice was starting to crack, from anger and emotion, but also because of the fear that was beginning to break through.

  “If I go to the Carabinieri, I’ll have to tell them that Manuela had a second telephone that no one else knew about. It won’t take them long to find the phone number, and then they’ll check the phone records. And then there will be plenty of things to explain, in situations much more disagreeable than this one.”

  She said nothing. She opened the car window, took out a cigarette, and lit it. Without asking if I minded, without apologizing for the stink. She smoked and looked straight ahead, at the sea. I thought how incredible it was that such a pretty face could be so twisted and deformed by rage and fear that it became ugly.

  “I think you’d better tell me the things you’ve been keeping from me. I think it’ll be better for you to tell me, rather than being forced to tell the Carabinieri and the prosecutor. There may be a way to limit the damage.”

  “Why are you so sure that Manuela had another number and that I have it?”

  I was about to ask her if she’d ever read that story by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t, though, because it struck me as highly unlikely that she had.

  “Your number doesn’t appear in the call records for Manuela’s cell phone that the Carabinieri obtained.”

  It took her a little while to absorb that information.

  “It’s inexplicable that there would never be a single call between the two of you, since you were such close friends. And at least one call should appear on the records, because you told me that you called Manuela to meet you for a drink that time. But not even that call shows up.”

  “I don’t remember where I called her. Maybe I called her at her house.”

  “Caterina, tell me about the other phone. Please.”

  She lit another cigarette. She smoked half of it, moving her head in an awkward, unnatural manner, as if her balance were suddenly off. Her lovely complexion had drained to a lusterless, sickly gray. Then, suddenly, she began to speak, but her eyes looked straight ahead.

  “Manuela had another phone number and another cell phone.”

  “And that’s the phone you called her on.”

  “Yes.”

  I hovered for a few seconds in a precarious equilibrium. I had focused entirely on getting her to admit the existence of a second phone number; I wasn’t ready for what came next. Then I decided that there was no reason, at that point, to beat around the bush.

  “What happened that Sunday?”

  “I’m cold,” she said. Her face had definitely lost all its color now.

  I pushed the button to close the passeng
er-side window, even though the cold wasn’t coming from outside.

  Then I waited for her to answer my question.

  36.

  “It seems impossible that it’s come to this point,” she said after a long silence, continuing to look away. Her words were dramatic, but her tone of voice was strangely neutral and colorless.

  “You had plans to meet, that Sunday afternoon, didn’t you?”

  She nodded without speaking.

  “You’d made those plans the day before.”

  She nodded again.

  “Did you go pick her up at the station, when she arrived from Ostuni?”

  “No. I was at Duilio’s house, and she was supposed to come meet us there.”

  “And did she?”

  “Yes, she got there around six, maybe a little later. She took a cab there from the train station and asked if she could take a shower.”

  “Does Duilio live alone?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, now he’s moved. He didn’t want to live in that apartment anymore.”

  “And that apartment would be where?”

  “He used to live up by the lighthouse, in one of those new apartment buildings facing the sea. Now he’s in the center of town.”

  “Why had you made plans to meet?”

  “Manuela was going back to Rome, and she wanted to stock up.”

  I swallowed, gulping uncomfortably. It was what I had expected to hear, but I still didn’t like it.

  “You mean, she wanted to stock up on cocaine?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was the cocaine only for her personal use?”

  “No, she sold coke, too, so she could pay for all the coke she was using.”

  “Did she sell it in Rome?”

  “Mostly. But I don’t know who her customers were.”

  “Did Nicoletta know? I mean, did she know that Manuela was dealing drugs?”

  “I don’t know, but I doubt it. What she told you when we went to see her is all she knows. More or less.”

  “So she came over to Duilio’s apartment to buy some cocaine to take with her to Rome.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How much was she going to get?”

  “I don’t know. She bought fifty, even a hundred grams at a time. They had an agreement. If she had the money, she paid right away. Otherwise, Duilio fronted her the money.”

  “What does Duilio do for a living?”

  “He has a car dealership. That is, he works at his father’s car dealership, but he’s involved in politics, too.”

  “And he makes a little extra by selling cocaine.”

  Once again, she nodded.

  “And how old is this gentleman?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  I took a few seconds to get my mental bearings, and then I continued questioning her.

  “So, Manuela came over to Duilio’s house, and you were there, too. She took a shower, and then what happened?”

  “The plan had been to go out for dinner, but first Manuela wanted to try some of the coke. It was from a new shipment that Duilio had just received the day before.”

  “And she had come for that purpose?”

  “That’s right. She’d been out of coke for a few days. She’d hoped to find some at the trulli, but nobody had any that weekend. So when she arrived she had only one thing in mind.”

  It occurred to me that Anita was a sharp-eyed observer. What was it she had said? Manuela didn’t strike me as an easygoing person. She seemed a little speedy.

  “What are you saying? Was she an addict?”

  “Well, she used almost every day. At first, she took other people’s coke, just at parties. Then gifts of a gram here and there and lines at parties weren’t enough anymore. And that’s why she started having to deal coke. She definitely couldn’t pay for all the coke she consumed with the money her parents gave her.”

  “Go on.”

  “She took a shower and then we decided to do a few lines before going out. That coke was incredible, like the best I’ve ever had. After two or three lines we were ready to go out, but she wanted more. She snorted more and more, and I told her to stop, that she was overdoing it. But she told me she hadn’t had any in days, and that it had been depressing and she needed to make up for lost time. She was laughing and looked a little crazy. At a certain point, Duilio started to get worried too.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Duilio said that’s enough, and he tried to take the bag away from her. She got mad at him, started shouting, and said that unless he gave her some more, she’d start screaming, she’d tear the house apart. I’m telling you, it seemed like she’d lost her mind.”

  For a few seconds, I stopped listening to Caterina’s words and concentrated instead on the sound of her voice. There was no emotion; the cadence was monotonous. It didn’t seem like she was telling a story that was rushing ineluctably toward a tragic ending. It didn’t sound at all like the voice of a young woman describing the death of her closest friend. I shook my head and shoulders as a shiver ran through me.

  “Could you repeat that last part, please? I’m sorry, I got distracted for a second.”

  “He told her he’d give her one more line and that was it. He was pouring the coke onto the table and his hand must have slipped. Like I said, she’d already had way too much cocaine, and then she took everything that had spilled out. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone over the top like that.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, a little while later, she started to feel sick. She was sweating and shaking and her heart was racing. It was like she’d suddenly come down with a fever. Her pupils were so dilated, it was scary to look her in the eye.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I wanted to call 911, but Duilio said we should wait. He’d seen people in that condition before, and after a little while they always got better. He said, ‘Come on, let’s wait. It happens sometimes. If you call 911, the police will come and we’ll be in deep shit. You’ll see. She’ll feel better in a minute.’ At a certain point, she stopped shaking and closed her eyes. We were so relieved, because it seemed like she’d fallen asleep. We thought it was over.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “After a few minutes, we realized she’d stopped breathing.”

  She still had the same neutral, flat tone of voice, no intensity to it. It was frightening.

  I had believed from the very outset that Manuela was dead. But now that I knew it, really knew it, now that a person who’d watched her die was telling me that she was dead, I had a hard time believing it. I tried to put my finger on the feeling and I realized that the whole time, even though I was convinced that Manuela was dead, I’d always imagined her alive.

  She was alive, in one of those parallel worlds where our imaginations create and keep their stories. The stories that we tell other people and the stories, so much more powerful and deceptive, that we tell ourselves.

  “So what did you do then?”

  “Duilio tried to give her mouth-to-mouth. Then he massaged her heart, but it didn’t do any good. So I said that we had to call the police immediately. I was starting to freak out.”

  I refrained from telling her that I found that difficult to believe, considering the cool, matter-of-fact way that she was relating the horrifying tale.

  “But you didn’t call.”

  “Duilio said it would be stupid. He said we’d both wind up in jail for no good reason. He said it had been an accident and that, after all was said and done, it had been Manuela’s fault for shoving all that cocaine up her nose. We couldn’t bring her back to life, and we’d just destroy our own lives.”

  “So what did you do next?”

  She told me what they did next. She told me how they got rid of Manuela’s body. They wrapped her in a carpet, just like in a B movie, took her to an illegal dump, in a distant corner of the Murgia highlands, and burned her wi
th her possessions on a stack of old car tires. Duilio told her that was the best method to get rid of a body. It was what Mafia hit men did. The tires burn completely, down to the smallest particle, and when they’re done burning there’s nothing left.

  As I listened, I was struck with a terrifying, dizzying feeling of unreality.

  This can’t be happening. This is a nightmare. Any minute now I’ll wake up in my own bed, drenched with sweat, and I’ll realize that none of this really happened. I’ll get out of bed, drink a glass of water, and then I’ll very slowly get dressed and go out for a walk, even though it’s dark out. The way I used to sometimes when I couldn’t sleep.

  Then I felt an overwhelming urge to punch her and free myself of her. My right hand formed a fist up on the seat. I thought that if it was unbearable for me to hear these things, for Manuela’s parents it would be torture.

  I didn’t hit her. I kept asking questions, because there were still things that I needed to know. Details. Or maybe not.

  “Didn’t you think the police would catch up with you eventually?”

  “No. Manuela had that second cell phone, the one you found out about. It had a memory card that she asked some guy in Rome to buy for her. That was Duilio’s idea. Duilio was really paranoid about wiretaps and eavesdropping, both because of the drugs and because of his political activity. She only used that phone to talk to me, Duilio, and, I think, the people she sold drugs to in Rome. The phone wasn’t in her name, and even her parents didn’t know about it. So we were pretty sure that no one could ever find the number and trace it back to us by checking the calls. No one knew we were going to see her that afternoon.”

  There was nothing else to say. It was banal—almost bureaucratic, almost perfect.

  Almost.

  “Why did you agree to talk to me?”

  “What else could I do? Manuela’s mother asked me to, and I couldn’t refuse. You all would have gotten suspicious, the way you got suspicious when Michele refused to meet with you.”

  “Then why did you decide to help me? To the extent that you did, of course.”

  Caterina took a deep breath, pulled out another cigarette, and lit it.