“But don’t you have… somebody?” I realized that I was struggling to find the right words, and it made me feel suddenly old and somehow inadequate.
“What do you mean, a boyfriend, a guy?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, it just occurred to me, when I thought about the fact that we’re planning a trip, that… well, it seemed…”
I realized that I was floundering. She noticed it, too, and did nothing to help me out of my difficulties. Quite the contrary. A smile came to her lips that at first glance might have seemed gentle and good-natured, but it really wasn’t. Not at all. She lowered her voice imperceptibly.
“Are you thinking of trying to seduce me in Rome? Should I be worried?”
I staggered for a second, the way a boxer does when he incautiously lowers his gloves and a solid right hook catches him full in the face. I even felt a faint blush redden my cheeks, and I realized that after all was said and done, I was still the same incompetent fuck-up I had been thirty years earlier, in that supermarket.
“Why not? We’d be a storybook couple, you and me. In fact, I was thinking of getting a ring and asking you to marry me.”
A very weak little routine, but I had to find some way of regaining my footing, and fast.
“I was asking because your boyfriend, if you have one, might not be that happy about you flying somewhere with another man, especially a man much older than you.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Ah. Why not?”
She leaned back in her chair and shrugged before answering.
“Well, relationships start and then they end. My last relationship ended a while ago, and for now I’m not looking for a replacement. At least not anything permanent. Let’s just say that I’m on hiatus. Though of course that doesn’t mean that I spend my evenings at home reading books in bed.”
Then, as if she’d just remembered that she had something to do, she gripped both the chair arms and pushed herself to her feet.
“As soon as I hear from Nicoletta and we make an appointment for the day after tomorrow, I’ll call you. That way you can make all the arrangements for our trip.”
“Okay,” I said, standing up myself and walking around my desk to escort her to the door.
I reached out to shake her hand and, with a perfectly timed move, she leaned toward me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Delicate, innocent. So innocent that it made me shiver.
After she left, I tried to get back to work.
I wasn’t very successful, and before I knew it I found myself following a distracting tangent of free-although thoroughly predictable-associations. I wondered which hotel I should choose, if it became necessary to spend the night in Rome. Obviously, I would reserve two separate rooms, that went without saying. Then I decided that-although I would of course act like a perfect gentleman, not like a dirty old man-it might even be fun to spend an evening with a pretty young woman. If my professional obligations happened to offer an evening’s entertainment, that was hardly a crime. After all, she was no minor. Maybe I could take her to a nice restaurant, a place with a good selection of wines. That was hardly the same as jumping her bones. Trying to get her into bed hadn’t even crossed my mind. “I’m not that kind of guy,” I said out loud. I felt a tingling sensation in my legs as my nose quickly began to grow.
23.
The following morning, when I turned my phone back on, I found a message from Caterina. She’d spoken with Nicoletta and made an appointment with her for the following afternoon. So I wouldn’t be able to reserve a round-trip flight for the same day; I’d have to arrange overnight accommodations. It was exactly what I expected, but I pretended-to myself, that is, a pretty easy audience as far as simple deceptions were concerned-to be moderately surprised at the news and at the consequences that it entailed.
Then I blocked any potential return of awareness by getting ready to leave my apartment. At eight o’clock Signore De Santis, my client in that morning’s trial in Lecce, would be swinging by to pick me up.
Signore De Santis was a builder and developer and, as the phrase goes, he was a self-made man. He’d started working as an assistant bricklayer at age fourteen and, step by step-without letting annoying details like paying taxes, respecting safety regulations on the job site, or complying with city zoning plans and regulations get in the way of his climb to the top-he’d become a very wealthy businessman. He was short, slightly popeyed, with a beard dyed a ridiculous, incongruous black, a head of hair that had all the earmarks of a transplant, and a strong smell of cheap aftershave.
He had been charged-unjustly, he claimed-with building an illegal subdivision in a historic district, after bribing a number of city officials. His interpretation of his indictment was that it was clearly a conspiracy orchestrated by a corrupt ring of Communist magistrates.
My own interpretation was that he was about as innocent as Al Capone and that if I succeeded in winning an acquittal (which struck me as a pretty remote possibility), eventually I’d have to answer to a higher authority for it.
He had insisted on giving me a ride to Lecce, in his car, a Lexus that probably cost as much as a decent-size apartment and was nearly as big. It didn’t take long for me to regret bitterly having accepted the offer. De Santis drove with all the caution and care of a Mumbai taxi driver, while blasting a succession of Italian pop hits from the seventies-the kind of stuff the U.S. could have used at Guantanamo to extract confessions from al-Qaeda hardliners.
We pulled onto the highway, and De Santis immediately accelerated to a cruising speed of one hundred five miles per hour. He took over the left-hand passing lane and would not give it up. If a car ahead of us failed to move out of his lane quickly enough, De Santis hit the horn-which sounded like a tugboat foghorn-and flicked his headlights so hard and fast that the car must have looked like an ambulance.
Hey, you psycho, slow it down. I don’t want to die this young.
“Signore De Santis, why don’t you take your foot off the pedal a little? We have plenty of time.”
“I like going fast, Counselor. You’re not scared, are you? This old bombshell can hit one hundred forty.”
I’ll take your word for it. Slow down, you old crackpot.
“I have two great passions in life,” he said, and he slapped the steering wheel. “Fast cars and fast women. How old are you, Counselor?”
“Forty-five.”
“Lucky man. I’m seventy. At your age, I was wild.”
“What do you mean?”
“With women. I never let one get away. A waitress-I hit that. My secretary-I hit that. My friend’s wife-I hit that. Once even a nun. I was-what’s the word?-relentless.”
You’re still relentless, I thought to myself, thinking of the road still ahead and the fact that I would be spending at least the next four hours with him.
“It’s not like I’m not getting any now. I’m still hitting it regularly, but when I was younger…”
That’s a cleaned-up version of what he said. He was much more clinical, and he frequently gestured at his personal equipment. I nodded understandingly, with an idiotic, bland expression of tolerance painted on my face, while deep down I did my best to repress a vision of myself in my seventies with a dyed mustache, telling someone about how I still hit that.
“Are you married, Counselor?”
“No. I used to be, but not anymore.”
“So you’re a free man. Free and easy,” he said.
At this point, I was afraid he’d ask me whether I, too, was relentless. Whether I hit it with, say, my cleaning woman. In my case, the cleaning woman in question was Signora Nennella, a stout woman who stood four feet eleven inches in her stocking feet and was in her mid-sixties, to say nothing of sagging breasts that were barely contained by her D-cup bra.
The whole scene was disturbing. I tried to find refuge in a Zen place in the recesses of my mind where I could filter out the disturbing stimuli f
rom the outside world. I told myself that if I found my Zen place, it would all be over before I knew it.
De Santis noticed my silence and assumed it must be due to a health issue. Something that might lead me to consult a urologist.
“What, you have some kind of problem?”
“Problem?” I was thinking the time had come to be a little more selective in choosing my clients.
He turned to look at me, completely ignoring the fact that the highway was hurtling toward us at one hundred ten miles per hour now. He looked down at my lap and winked. The melodic guitar and sappy vocals of the Teppisti dei Sogni filled the interior of the car like a mist of maple syrup.
“So, you’re okay down there?”
Pull over at the first rest area and let me out, you old psycho. After that, feel free to drive at top speed into a bridge or an oak tree, as long as you’re careful not to involve innocent third parties.
That’s not what I said.
“Just fine, thanks.”
De Santis didn’t seem to consider the answer satisfactory, so he kept up his questioning, pursuing the same line of inquiry.
“What about your prostate? You getting your prostate checked?”
“No, I’m not, to tell you the truth.”
“Have a doctor look at it, I’ll bet you anything he finds it’s enlarged. If you ask me, you don’t have it looked at because you’re afraid of what they do. The urologist puts on a pair of latex gloves and then he takes his finger-”
“I know what a urologist does.”
A few minutes of silence ensued. It seemed that our discussion of a visit to the urologist might have given my client pause. I hoped in vain that the silence would last until we reached Lecce. No such luck.
“Have you ever taken Viagra?”
“No.”
“I have some on me at all times, even though my doctor tells me not to overdo it, because it can be bad for the heart. But I say, what better way to die than to have a heart attack right in the middle of a good lay.”
And so it went, on and on, as we got to Lecce and entered the courtroom. Only when the trial actually got underway was De Santis forced to stop talking. We listened to the testimony of the prosecution witnesses. We listened to the analysis of the prosecutor’s expert witness, and then the court adjourned for another session to hear the testimony of the defense witnesses. By that point, if I had ever had any doubts, I was quite certain that my client would be found guilty. For the sake of my own mental health-we still had the whole return trip ahead of us-I decided that the better part of valor would be to keep that information to myself and not share it with the man who always hit it.
When we finally got back to Bari that afternoon, I asked him to drop me off in front of a travel agency across town from my office. This wasn’t the agency our law firm normally employed. I bought two round-trip tickets to Rome and I reserved two rooms in a hotel near Piazza del Popolo. I explained to the agent-and I’m pretty sure she could not have cared less-that I was going on a business trip with a colleague. It finally dawned on me that I was behaving as furtively as a criminal about to go on the lam.
As I was leaving the travel agency, Quintavalle called me.
“Counselor.”
“Damiano, any news?”
“I have some information that might be useful to you.”
“I’m all ears.”
After a couple of seconds of silence, I realized how stupid I had been. I thought back on all the times that I had laughed at the stupidity of people who said things on the phone they shouldn’t have, only to wind up in handcuffs.
“Or maybe we should meet to discuss it in person?”
“Shall I come to your office?”
“I’m on the street, over near Corso Sonnino. If it’s convenient to you, and you’re not too far away, maybe you could swing by and meet me in a cafe.”
“I’m on my Vespa. How about we meet in ten minutes at the Riviera?”
“Okay.”
24.
It only took me a few minutes to get to the Bar Riviera, which was virtually empty at that hour of the afternoon. I went upstairs to the terrace and took a table with an unbroken view of the Adriatic Sea. This was exactly where I used to sit when I was in college. I’d come here with my friends and spend endless, crazy, wonderful afternoons talking.
One of those afternoons in particular surfaced from my memory. We had just finished a seminar in political economics, and after wandering around town for half an hour we ended up at the Riviera. I’m pretty sure that, as usual, we started off talking about girls. Somehow, I’m not sure how, we wandered from that topic to characters from novels-with whom did we identify with most, who would we have most liked to be. Andrea said Athos, Emilio said Philip Marlowe, I said Captain Fracasse, and, lastly, Nicola said that he wanted to be Athos, too. There ensued a lively exchange of views as to which of the two-Andrea or Nicola-had a better claim to play the role of the Comte de la Fere. Andrea pointed out that Nicola-who made excessive use of cologne and aftershave-might realistically hope to be Aramis, but if the truth be told he really was perfect for the role of Milady. This piece of advice raised the volume of the debate, and Nicola allowed that expert testimony as to his personal virility could be provided, in considerable detail, by either Andrea’s mother or his sister.
If I half-closed my eyes I could still hear our voices, rendered up intact and authentic from the archives of my memory. Emilio’s deep tenor, Nicola’s nasal voice, the quick cadence of Andrea’s, occasionally rising to a shrill pitch, and my own voice-which I have never been able to describe. All those voices were there, hovering in the air of that big empty room, reminding me that ghosts exist and wander among us.
That memory could have triggered a bout of sadness. Instead, it gave me a faint, inexplicable sense of excitement, as if the past were suddenly no longer past and instead formed a sort of extended present, simultaneous and welcoming. Sitting in that cafe, waiting to meet with a coke dealer, I felt for an instant as if my mind had embraced the synchronic mystery of time and memory.
Then the coke dealer arrived, and that odd enchantment vanished as suddenly as it had arrived.
We ordered two cappuccinos and sat silently until the waiter brought them to our table and vanished down the stairs, leaving us alone. Only then did we begin talking.
“So, Damiano?”
“I asked around, and I may have found something.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There’s a young gay guy I know who sells coke in clubs and discos. Actually, he’s sort of a hybrid dealer/user: Basically, he sells coke to pay for his personal use. He told me that he does know a certain Michele who often has plenty of cocaine. He said that sometimes he bought small amounts from him, and that other times he sold coke to Michele. This is fairly normal between small-time dealers: They go back and forth-when one guy has it he’ll sell to the other, and vice versa.”
“Why do you think this could be the Michele we’re looking for?”
“You told me your Michele is handsome, right?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“My gay friend said this Michele was a prime hunk of meat. His exact words.”
“Let me guess: The problem is that he doesn’t know his last name.”
“No, he doesn’t, but if we could just show him a picture…”
Right. If we could just show him a picture. I had to stop wasting time and find a way to get that picture. I’d have to call Fornelli. Or maybe, I thought, maybe Caterina could get me a photograph of Michele. That reminded me that I needed to call her to arrange our departure the following day.
“Counselor?”
“Yes?”
“Can I be sure that this guy isn’t going to get in trouble because of the things he’s telling me?”
“You mean this gay friend of yours?”
“Well, he’s not actually a friend, but yes, I mean him.”
“Don’t worry, Damiano. The only thin
g I care about is finding out what happened to Manuela. You and I never even had this conversation, as far as I’m concerned.”
Quintavalle seemed relieved.
“Sorry to ask, but-”
I raised my hand to stop him. Of course I understood his concern perfectly. For someone in his line of work, just asking questions could be dangerous. I thanked him, told him that I’d try to find a picture of Michele and I’d call him when I did. Then we both left the bar and went back to our respective-more and less legitimate-jobs.
I called Caterina on my way back to my office. I told her that I’d reserved an 11:00 A.M. flight to Rome the next morning and that I’d come by and pick her up on my way to the airport at 9:30. I asked her if her address was still the same as the one listed in the transcripts of the interviews with the Carabinieri; she said, yes, that was the address, but to make things easier we could just meet in front of the Teatro Petruzzelli. I felt an unmistakable wave of relief at the idea that I wouldn’t have to go to her house and risk that her mother or father-who were probably more or less the same age I was-might see me, realize that their daughter was consorting with a middle-aged cradle robber, and decide to take drastic steps, possibly involving pipe wrenches or baseball bats or other instruments of dissuasion.
I remembered the picture of Michele just as I was about to hang up.
“Oh, Caterina?”
“Yes?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of Michele Cantalupi, would you?”
She didn’t answer right away, and if silence can have an intonation, her silence was followed by a big question mark.
“What do you need it for?” she said at last.
“I need to show it to someone. Anyway, we’d better not talk about it on the phone. I’ll explain tomorrow. You think you can find one?”
“I’ll take a look, but I don’t think I have one.”
“Okay, see you tomorrow, then.”
“See you tomorrow.”
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