Temporary Perfections

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  “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.

  I missed the life I used to have—or rather, I missed the lives I used to have. Lives that were more or less normal. When I was married to Sara and when I was with Margherita. But it was a gentle emotion, painless. Or perhaps I should say there was a tolerable amount of pain.

  There were times when I wished I could meet someone I liked as much as I had once liked them, but I realized that wasn’t realistic. The thought made me a little sad, but that too was generally quite tolerable. And when that sadness welled up, at times verging dangerously on self-pity, I told myself not to complain. I had my work, sports, the occasional trip on my own. I went out, occasionally, with courteous, distant friends. And then there were my books. Sure, there was something missing. But I was one of those kids who took it to heart when they told me I shouldn’t complain because children in Africa were starving.

  A few weeks earlier I had left my office about ten o’clock at night, after it had rained all day. I bought a green-tea yogurt at the corner store that stays open late, and I started eating as I walked north.

  I love eating on the street. Given the right conditions—those nighttime walks, for one—it brings back memories of being a child. Intact crystal-clear memories with no regret attached to them. Sometimes I feel a kind of euphoria, as if time had short-circuited and I had become the boy I once was, with an abundance of first experiences still ahead of me. It’s an illusion, but it’s not bad, as illusions go.

  I skirted the endless fencing around the harbor and stayed on Viale Vittorio Veneto, alongside the bicycle path. After all that rain, the city looked as if it had been varnished with a shiny black lacquer. No bicycles, no pedestrians, not many cars. It was a scene out of Blade Runner, and this feeling only grew stronger when I turned onto the empty blue-black streets that sprawl in all directions behind the Fiera del Levante, a giant industrial complex that has been abandoned for decades, and the former public slaughterhouse, which has been converted into a national library. Its courtyards look like something out of a Giorgio de Chirico painting. There are no cafés, restaurants, or stores in that part of town. Only machine shops, depots, empty warehouses, garages, dead smokestacks, the courtyards of factories that have been shut down for decades, full of weeds, stray dogs, owls, and furtive urban foxes.

  The sense of unease that emanates from those places feels good to me, oddly enough. It seems to drain my own personal unease, drawing it into its own dark vortex. It’s as if the vague fear of an external danger frees me from my fear of internal danger, which is darker and harder to control. After I take these walks in deserted, spectral places, I sleep like a baby, and I usually wake up in a good mood, too.

  I was in the middle of the no-man’s land along the boundary between the Libertà neighborhood and the San Girolamo neighborhood when, down a side street, I saw a blue-and-red sign that looked like a neon sign from the 1950s glowing in the damp, slightly grimy dark.

  It was a bar, and it seemed to have been dropped among the industrial warehouses, the machine shops, and the darkness from a faraway place and a time long ago.

  The sign read CHELSEA HOTEL NO. 2, the title of one of my favorite songs. A dim green light came from inside, through thick, green ground-glass windows.

  I walked in and took a look around. There was a nice smell in the air: food, cleanliness, and spices. It smelled warm, dry, and comfortable, the way some houses do.

  The club was furnished in an American mid-century modern style that matched the neon sign; the furniture seemed to be arranged quite casually. But as I looked around, I realized that there was nothing random about the place. Someone who knew what he—or she—was doing and who enjoyed that kind of work had spent a lot of time on it. The walls were covered with film posters. Some of the older posters looked original—and expensive.

  The music was at an acceptable volume—I hate loud music, with a few rare exceptions—and there were a lot of people, considering the late hour. Something else was in the air, something I managed to put my finger on only as I was sitting down at the bar, perched on a high wood-and-leather stool.

  The Chelsea Hotel No. 2 was a gay bar. As that epiphany hit me, I remembered someone explaining to me years before that Chelsea was New York’s most crowded and effervescent gay neighborhood. And so—I said to myself in a mental whisper—the name of this club, in which I was sitting, so deliberately American, was neither random nor (solely) born of a love for Leonard Cohen’s music.

  At one table, two young women were holding hands, talking intently, and occasionally kissing. They reminded me of the two Giovannas, friends of Margherita’s, martial arts enthusiasts and sky divers. In fact, for a couple of seconds, I wondered if it was them, but then it dawned o
n me that the two Giovannas were probably not the only two lesbians in the whole city.

  The other tables were occupied mostly, in fact almost exclusively, by men.

  Suddenly, I felt as if I had been tossed into the famous scene in the movie Police Academy in which the two stupid cadets wind up in a gay leather bar and find themselves slow dancing with mustachioed, muscle-bound men wearing Nazi trooper hats and black leather. I wondered how many of them I’d be able to knock down before I was outnumbered and I succumbed to the inevitable.

  Okay, I’m exaggerating. The situation was totally normal. The music wasn’t by the Village People (while I was thinking those things, “Dance Me to the End of Love” was playing, quietly and respectably, in the background), and nobody was wearing black leather or anything remotely S&M looking.

  That said, however, my being here might prove to be awkward. I could imagine running into someone I knew—perhaps a fellow lawyer, or a magistrate—and wondered how I’d explain that I’d ended up here due to my habit of taking long walks late at night in the more run-down sections of the city.

  I tried to remember all the gay lawyers and judges I knew. I came up with five, and noted to my relief that none of them were in the club.

  Then, immediately after this mental screening process, I decided I must be losing my mind. Sure, this was a slightly unusual situation, but it still wasn’t a normal reason for me to look around with a worried and vaguely furtive expression, as if the sign outside read Stonewall Lambda Gay and Lesbian Activist Headquarters, or something like that.

  While I was planning a nonchalant exit—from that place and from my own tortured thoughts—a voice drowned out the notes of Leonard Cohen and abolished the possibility that my visit to the Chelsea Hotel No. 2 might pass unobserved.

  “Counselor Guerrieri!” I turned to my right, blushing and wondering how I could explain my presence in the club to the person behind that voice, whoever it might be.

  Nadia. Nadia, but I couldn’t remember her last name.

  She’d been my client, four or five years earlier.

  She was a former model, a former porn actress, and a former high-end escort, and she had been arrested for organizing and running a business providing very beautiful and very expensive escorts all over the city. I had succeeded in getting her acquitted in an unexpected way—on what those outside the profession might call a technicality. I discovered a vice of form, an irregularity in the wiretapping. The prosecution’s case crumbled like a cracker.

  I have a very clear image of Nadia during the trial. She wore a charcoal-gray suit, a white blouse, very discreet makeup. She looked like anything but a prostitute. The fact that she didn’t fit any of the clichés of her profession had become increasingly clear to me every time I saw her—first in jail, immediately after her arrest, later at my office, and, for the last time, in the courtroom.

  That evening, however, she was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a tight white t-shirt. She seemed—I’m not sure how this was possible—both older and younger and, despite her casual dress, she was just as elegant as the last time I’d seen her. I tried to remember if I’d noticed how pretty she was when she was my client.

  “Hey there,” I said, and then I realized how flip it sounded. “I mean, hello, good evening. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, but, well, I’m surprised to see you.”

  “And I’m surprised to see you here. Welcome to my club.”

  I straightened up and tried to speak properly. “Your club? This is your place of business?”

  “And you didn’t offend me at all. I like to think we know each other well.”

  “Oh, of course. We needn’t stand on ceremony.”

  “What are you doing in this part of town?” She said it with a smile and, I seemed to detect, a hint of amused mischief. The real question, tacit but not all that tacit: So you’re gay? Now I understand why you behaved so properly when I was your client and didn’t try to take advantage of the situation.

  No. I’m. Not. Gay. I just happened to walk into the place, because I like to take long walks late at night through the far-flung sections of the city, because I like to walk where there aren’t any crowds. No, I didn’t come here to see who I could pick up, and yes, yes, I realize that it might seem hard to believe, but I assure you that I was just taking an aimless walk. I saw the light in the dark street, and I stepped inside, but I did not know that this was a, well, I didn’t know what kind of club it was, not that I’m prejudiced in any way. Let me make this clear: I’ve always been liberal. I’m open-minded, and I have lots of friends who are homosexuals.

  Well, okay, maybe not lots, but one or two. Anyway, let me repeat: I’m. Not. Gay.

  But that’s not what I said. I just shrugged and put on an expression that, I think, could have meant anything. And which therefore meant nothing. And which was therefore the right expression for that situation.

  “Well, I was just out walking. I saw the sign, and I was curious, so I thought I’d step inside and take a look. Nice place you have here.”

  She smiled.

  “Are you gay? You certainly didn’t strike me as gay when I was your client.”

  I was happy that she asked. It simplified things. I told her that, no, I wasn’t gay and then I told her about my late-night walks, and she thought it sounded perfectly normal, and I felt a surge of gratitude that she said that. Then she offered me a little glass of delicious rum—a brand I’d never heard of in my life. Then she offered me another, and when I looked at my watch, I realized it was really late. She made me promise to come back, even if I wasn’t gay. There were other straight customers—not many, she added, but a few—and it was a quiet, relaxed place. The food was good and they often had live music, and she said she’d like it if I came back. She looked me in the eye when she said that, with a natural manner that I liked very much. So I promised, and as I said it, I knew it was a promise I would keep.

  After that, I became a regular at the Chelsea Hotel. I liked being able to sit by myself without feeling alone. I felt comfortable there, and it was a generally happy and fairly intimate environment. It reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite pin down.

  One of the first times that I went there, while I was waiting for my order to arrive and I was sitting alone at my table, a young man stopped right in front of me and asked if he could sit down.

  “Now, be civil,” I said to myself as I gestured to indicate that, of course, he was welcome to sit down. He shook my hand—he had a firm grip—and told me that his name was Oliviero. After a brief chatty exchange, Oliviero stared into my eyes and told me that he liked mature men. I thought, but didn’t say, Who are you calling mature? I was trying to come up with a polite way to let him know that things aren’t always as they seem. Just then, Nadia arrived with my order.

  “Guido isn’t gay, Oliviero.”

  He gave her a dramatic sneer. Then he looked at me, with disappointment stamped on his face.

  “What a pity. But it’s never too late. I had a boyfriend—much older than you—who didn’t figure out he was gay until he was forty-four. How old are you?”

  “Forty-five,” I said, with a slightly excessive burst of enthusiasm. Then I specified that I doubted there were any radical changes in view, as far as my sexual orientation was concerned. Still, Oliviero was welcome to drink a glass of wine with me.

  It turned out Oliviero didn’t drink. A short while later he left with a puzzled expression on his face. And that was the only time that a man tried to pick me up at the Chelsea Hotel.

  I rode there on my bicycle, I listened to music and sometimes discovered things I’d never heard before, I ate, I conversed with Nadia, I drank excellent liquor, and I went home feeling pretty relaxed. Not a bad thing in hard times.

  That evening, when I left my office after my meeting with Fornelli and the Ferraros, I decided that it was a perfect night to go see Nadia. So I got out my bike, and fifteen minutes later I was there. But when I turned the corner and saw the
sign was turned off and the security shutter pulled down, I remembered that the place was closed Monday nights.

  Wrong evening, I said to myself as I turned back toward the center of town and home. I could tell I wasn’t going to have an easy time getting to sleep.

  7.

  The next morning, Fornelli called to express his gratitude again.

  “Guido, I can’t thank you enough. Believe me, I understood what you were trying to tell us yesterday. I know this is a last-ditch effort that probably won’t lead to anything. I know this isn’t the kind of work you do.”

  “It’s okay, Sabino, don’t worry about it.”

  “When the prosecutor told me that he was planning to close the case, the only thing I could think to do was to call you. Those poor people are both just ravaged by grief. He’s worse off than she is, as you probably noticed.”

  “Is he taking some kind of medication?”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “Yes, he’s drugged to the gills. But it doesn’t seem to have any effect, except to make him sleepy. He was—” Fornelli realized the grim implication of his use of the past tense, and quickly stopped himself. “He is very fond of his daughter, and all this has just crushed him. The mother is stronger. She’s ready to fight. I haven’t seen her shed a tear since the girl disappeared.”

  “I didn’t ask yesterday whether you tried to get in touch with that TV show about missing persons.”

  “Chi l’ha visto? Yes, they included a short segment about Manuela’s disappearance in a couple of episodes, and they put her in their database. But it didn’t do a lot of good. You’ll see in the file that there’s a statement by a nutcase who called the Carabinieri after watching the show. He said that he’d seen her working as a prostitute on the outskirts of Foggia.”