Temporary Perfections gg-4

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  I was trying for light sarcasm, but a slight note of exasperation crept into my voice. It bothered me that deep down I agreed with her, and I hated being forced to play the part that I liked least in that conversation.

  “But if you don’t want to handle the appeal for that clown with the Rolex, I’ll handle it.”

  She shook her head and gathered up the files, and then she stuck out her tongue at me. Before I could react, she turned on her heel and left the room. The little scene aroused an unexpected feeling in me. It gave me a sense of family, of domestic warmth, of well-being mixed with splinters of nostalgia. The people who worked alongside me in my law office were my substitute family, the family I no longer had. For a few seconds, I was on the verge of tears. Then I rubbed my eyes, though I wasn’t actually crying, and told myself that I ought to at least try to lose my mind a little at a time, not in one fell swoop. Back to work.

  At 8:30, as Maria Teresa, Pasquale, and Consuelo were leaving for the evening, Sabino Fornelli arrived with his clients and their mysterious case.

  5.

  Fornelli’s clients were a man and a woman, husband and wife. I guessed that each was about ten years my senior. A few days later, I would read their personal information in the court records and discover that we were almost exactly the same age.

  Of the two, the husband made the stronger impression on me. His gaze was vacant, his shoulders stooped, his clothes hanging off his frame. When I shook hands with him, I felt as if I’d picked up an unhappy invertebrate creature.

  The wife, who was nicely dressed, looked more normal. But on closer inspection, there was something unhealthy about her gaze, the aftermath of an injury to her soul. When they came into my office, it was like a gust of damp, chilly wind came in, too.

  We introduced ourselves in this vaguely uneasy atmosphere, which remained in place throughout our conversation.

  “Signore and Signora Ferraro have been my clients for many years. Tonino, Antonio,” and here he gestured toward the husband, perhaps concerned that I might assume that the wife was named Tonino, “owns a few furniture and kitchen supply stores, here in Bari and in the province. Rosaria was a gym teacher, but she retired from teaching a few years ago, and now she works with him managing the stores. They have two children.”

  At that point, he stopped talking and sat for a minute in silence. I looked at him, then over to Antonio, aka Tonino, then at Rosaria. Then I looked back at him with a friendly but quizzical smile that morphed into a grimace. From the street outside, I heard a clash of sheet metal, and figured that there’d been a fender bender. Fornelli went on.

  “They have a daughter, their older child, and a son who’s younger, sixteen years old. His name is Nicola, and he goes to the science high school. Their daughter, Manuela, is twenty-two, and she’s at the university in Rome-the LUISS.”

  He paused, as if to catch his breath and gather his strength.

  “Manuela disappeared six months ago.”

  I don’t know why I blinked my eyes shut at those words, but when, in the darkness behind my eyelids, I saw globes of blinding light, I opened them again immediately.

  “Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?”

  Truly a brilliant question, I thought to myself a second later. What do you mean, disappeared? Maybe he meant during a magician’s stage show. You’re really at your best tonight, Guerrieri.

  The father looked at me. There was an indescribable expression on his face; a few facial muscles twitched, as if he were about to speak, but he said nothing. I had the distinct impression that he was simply unable to speak. As I looked at him, the words of an old song by Francesco De Gregori floated into my mind: “Do you by any chance know a girl from Rome whose face looks like a collapsing dam?” The face of Signore Ferraro, furniture salesman and desperate father, looked like a collapsing dam.

  It was the wife who finally spoke.

  “Manuela disappeared in September. She’d spent the weekend with friends who have a group of trulli in the countryside between Cisternino and Ostuni. On Sunday afternoon, a young woman gave her a ride to the train station in Ostuni. No one’s heard from her or seen her since.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. I ought to have expressed my sympathy, my understanding, but what do you say to two parents grieving over the disappearance of their daughter? Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, but don’t get too upset, this sort of thing happens. You’ll see, before you know it, your daughter will show up, life will go on as before, and this will all seem like a bad dream.

  A bad dream? I thought to myself that if a grownup has been missing for a long time-and six months is definitely a long time-either something bad has happened, or he or she has run away. Sure, it’s possible she’s lost her memory, maybe she’s wandering around confused and eventually will be found and brought home. Sometimes that happens to the elderly. Manuela, though, was not elderly. But why were they meeting with a lawyer? What did I have to do with this? Why had they come to see me? I wondered when I’d be able to ask that question without seeming callous.

  “I imagine the police, or the Carabinieri, have questioned her friend, right?”

  “Of course. The Carabinieri handled the investigation. We have copies of all the documents. I’ll bring them to your office,” Fornelli said.

  Why would he need to bring me copies of the documents? I shifted in my chair the way I do when I don’t understand what’s going on and I feel uncomfortable.

  “Anyway, here’s the story in brief. Manuela didn’t have a car; she went to the trulli with a group of friends. She was supposed to come home Sunday afternoon, but she hadn’t managed to find anyone who was coming back directly to Bari, so she accepted a ride to the station in Ostuni so she could take the train.”

  “Do we know whether she got on a train?”

  “We think so, but we don’t know for sure. We do know she bought a ticket.”

  “How do you know she bought a ticket?”

  “The Carabinieri talked to the ticket clerk. They showed him her photograph, and he remembered selling Manuela a ticket.”

  That’s unusual, I thought to myself. Ticket clerks, like anyone else who works with the public, barely glance at their customers. They hardly see their faces, and if they do they forget them immediately. It’s understandable: They see so many faces every day that they can’t possibly remember them all, unless there’s something special about them. Fornelli sensed what I was thinking and provided the answer before I could even ask the question.

  “Manuela is a very pretty girl, and I believe that’s why the ticket clerk remembered her.”

  “And you said it was impossible to know whether she got on the train.”

  “They couldn’t establish that with any certainty. The Carabinieri talked to the conductors on all the afternoon trains. Only one thought he might have seen a young woman who resembled Manuela, but he was much less confident than the ticket clerk. Let’s say that it’s likely she got on a train-you’ll see the statements later-but we can’t be sure of it.”

  “When did they realize their daughter had disappeared?”

  “Tonino and Rosaria have a beach house at Castellaneta Marina. They were there with Nicola. Manuela spent a few days with them and then left. She said she was going to spend the weekend at her friends’ trulli. From there, she phoned them to say that she was leaving for Rome Sunday night by train, or by car if she managed to find a ride. The following week, she was supposed to go to the university, I believe either for a meeting with a professor or to go to the registrar’s office.”

  “She was supposed to meet with a professor,” the mother said.

  “Yes, that’s right. Anyway, they realized that she was missing on Monday. Tonino and Rosaria came home to Bari on Sunday night. She didn’t call the next morning, but that was pretty normal. Rosaria tried to call her in the afternoon, but got a recording saying Manuela’s cell phone was out of range.”

  The mother broke in again, while the father s
at in silence.

  “I tried to call her two or three times, but the phone was still out of range. Then I sent her a text message, telling her to call me, but she didn’t. That’s when I started getting worried. I called her all afternoon, but her phone was turned off. So I called Nicoletta, the friend she lived with in Rome, and she told me that Manuela never showed up.”

  “Do you think she was ever home in Bari?”

  Fornelli answered me, because Rosaria was breathing hard, as if she’d climbed several flights of stairs.

  “The concierge lives in the building, and she keeps an eye on things even on Sundays; she never saw her. And there was no sign she’d been home.

  “After they talked to Nicoletta they called a few other friends of Manuela’s, but nobody knew anything. Only that she’d been at the trulli and that she left on Sunday afternoon. At that point, they called the Carabinieri-it was nighttime by then-but they said there was nothing they could do. If Manuela had been a minor, then they could have started a search, but Manuela is an adult, so she’s free to come and go as she pleases, to turn off her cell phone if she wants to, and so on.”

  “And the Carabinieri told them to come in early the next day to make an official missing persons report.”

  “Yes. At that point, they tried calling the police, but the answer was more or less the same. So they called me. Tonino wanted to get in the car and drive to Rome, but I talked him out of it. What could he do in Rome? Where could he go? They’d already spoken to Manuela’s roommate, who told them that she hadn’t been there. And nothing proved she’d left for Rome anyway. The opposite, actually. So we spent the night calling every one of Manuela’s friends whose number we could find, but we turned up nothing.”

  For a few moments I had a clear, suffocating, intolerable perception of the anguish that must have saturated that night, with the frantic phone calls and the lurking, unnameable fear. I had an urge-absurd but powerful-to jump up and run away from my own office, just to get away from that sense of anguish. And I really did escape, for a few seconds: I was mentally gone, as if I’d allowed myself to be dragged to safety in some other place that was less oppressive. As a result, I missed part of Fornelli’s account. I remember becoming aware of his voice again through my dazed fog when he was already halfway through the story he was telling.

  “… and at that point they realized there was a serious problem, and they opened an investigation. They interviewed a lot of people. They requested Manuela’s cell phone records and her ATM transactions, and they examined her computer. They were thorough, but in all these months not a thing has turned up, and we don’t know any more today than we did the first day.”

  Why were they telling me all this? Perhaps the time had come to ask.

  “I’m very sorry. Is there some way I can be of help?”

  The woman looked at my colleague. The husband also turned slowly and looked at him, with that devastated face that looked like it was about to fall apart. Fornelli looked at them for a few seconds, then turned to speak to me.

  “A few days ago, I went in to talk to the assistant district attorney who has the case.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A guy named Carella who’s been here only a short time.”

  “Yes, he just got here. He came from Sicily, I think.”

  “What do you make of him?”

  “I don’t know him well yet, but I’d say he’s a respectable attorney. He’s a little dull, perhaps, but I think he earns his keep.”

  Fornelli grimaced, almost imperceptibly and certainly involuntarily, and then continued.

  “When I went to see him, to review the situation, he told me he was getting ready to request that the case be closed. Almost six months have gone by, he told me, and he has no evidence that would justify extending the investigation.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I tried to tell him that he can’t just close a case like that. He responded that if I had any other leads to suggest, I was welcome to do so, and he’d take my request under consideration. Unless I brought something else to his attention, though, he’d have to request the case be archived. Of course, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t reopen the case if something new came up.”

  “So,” I said, as I began to guess why they’d come to see me.

  “On my recommendation, Tonino and Rosaria would like to hire you to study the file and identify any further lines of investigation that we can suggest to the prosecutor, to keep him from closing the case.”

  “Your confidence in me is flattering, but that’s a job for an investigator, not a lawyer.”

  “We don’t feel comfortable going directly to a private investigator. You’re a criminal lawyer, and you’re a good one. You’ve seen plenty of files. You know what goes into an investigation. Money is the least of our concerns. In fact, money isn’t a concern at all. We’ll spend whatever’s necessary, for you and for a private investigator, if you decide you want to work with one.”

  Except I had no fee schedule for that kind of professional service. The official guild fee list doesn’t include “investigative consultation to locate missing persons.” That unhappy thought came to mind immediately and made me feel uncomfortable. In my discomfort I looked around, and I happened to meet the gaze of the father. That’s when it dawned on me that he was probably on medication. Psychiatric drugs. Maybe they were causing his vacant expression. I felt even more uncomfortable. I decided that I should thank them courteously but decline the offer. It would be wrong to feed their hopes and take their money. But I didn’t know how to say it.

  I felt like the hard-boiled detective character in one of those cheap mystery novels. A down-on-his-luck private investigator who receives a visit from a client, insists he can’t take the case-just to give the story a little rhythm, to add an element of suspense-and then changes his mind and goes for it. And of course, he always solves the mystery.

  But there was nothing to solve in this case. Maybe they’d never know what happened to their daughter, or maybe they would, but I certainly wasn’t the right person to get them the information they wanted.

  I spoke almost without realizing it and without complete control of my words. As often happens, I said something entirely different from what I was thinking.

  “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. In all likelihood-almost certainly-the district attorney’s office and the Carabinieri have already done everything possible. If there have been gross oversights, we can think about doing some further investigating and file some writs of insufficient evidence, but, I repeat, don’t get your hopes up. You said you have a complete copy of the file?”

  “Yes, I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

  “All right, but there’s no reason for you to come in. You can have one of your assistants drop it off.”

  Fornelli awkwardly pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.

  “Thank you, Guido. This is an advance on your expenses. Tonino and Rosaria want you to accept it. We feel sure you can do something for us. Thank you.”

  But of course, I thought to myself. I’ll solve the mystery, between a shot of whiskey and a vigorous fistfight. I felt like Nick Belane, Charles Bukowski’s bizarre private investigator, and there was nothing funny about it.

  I walked them to the door and then returned to my room, passing through the dark, empty outer office. For a moment I was uneasy, scared the way I’d been as a child. I sat at my desk and looked at the envelope, still where Fornelli had put it. I opened it up and pulled out a check. It bore a ridiculously high number. For a moment, my vanity was flattered, but that was cancelled out by discomfort.

  I decided I had to return it, but immediately afterward I realized that for the Ferraros-and perhaps for Fornelli as well-paying me was a way of soothing their anguish. It gave them the illusion that the payment would inevitably be followed by some concrete useful action. If I returned the check, it would be proof that there really was nothing left to do, and I would have deprived them of even
that last, tiny, temporary sense of relief.

  I couldn’t do it. Not right away, at least.

  I couldn’t manage to get the face of Signore Antonio Ferraro, aka Tonino, out of my head. Evidently, the loss of his first-born daughter had caused him to lose his mind.

  I searched for that old song on YouTube. I found a live recording, and I put my feet up on the desk and half-closed my eyes as the opening chords played. Now he lives in Atlantis with a hatful of memories,

  And the face of someone who understands.

  Exactly.

  6.

  In the street, the air was chilly, especially because of the northwest mistral wind.

  I didn’t want to go home. I had no desire to hole up in the solitude that sometimes hangs a little too heavy in my apartment. I needed to shake off the grim mood of that meeting before going to sleep. And, secondarily, I needed a nourishing meal and a comforting drink. So I decided to go to the Chelsea Hotel.

  Not the famous red-brick hotel in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, but a club-in Bari’s San Girolamo neighborhood-that I had stumbled upon a few weeks earlier. It had become my favorite place to go in the evening when I didn’t want to stay in.

  Since moving my practice to my new office, I’d developed a habit of taking long walks late at night in unfamiliar sections of the city. I’d leave work after ten o’clock, as I had that evening. I’d wolf down a sandwich, a slice of pizza, or some sushi, and then I’d start walking, with the brisk step of someone who has places to go and no time to waste. Actually, I had nowhere to go, though I was probably searching for something.

  These walks gave me a workout when I didn’t feel like training with a punching bag, but more importantly they gave me a chance to explore the city and my solitude. Every so often, I stopped to think how little social interaction I had since Margherita had left, and even more so since she’d written me that she wouldn’t be coming back.