Temporary Perfections (6 page)

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.

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.”

“Did the Carabinieri look into it?”

“Yes, they did. And they realized almost immediately that this guy systematically calls police stations and Carabinieri barracks all over Italy to report sightings of dozens of missing people. Six or seven other people called in to say that they thought they’d seen a girl who looked like Manuela at the Ventimiglia train station, in Bologna, in Brescia dressed as a gypsy, in a small town near Crotone, and some other place that I can’t remember. All of them were interviewed and reports were filed, but nothing solid emerged. The Carabinieri explained to me that every time a missing person is discussed on television, they receive a bunch of phone calls from people who claim to have information but actually know nothing at all. They may not all be pathological liars, technically speaking, but they do it to get attention.”

I let this new information sink in, and realized that at this point I was curious to take a look at the file.

“All right, Sabino, let me take a look at the documents. I’ll see if there are grounds to consider a new investigation, and maybe to hire a private investigator. But if I don’t see anything, if I decide there’s no point in looking into it any further, you’re going to have to take back that check.”

“Just deposit it for now. We’ll talk again after you’ve had a chance to examine the documents. And reading a file is work, in any case.”

I was about to say that I’d take the money when I’d earned it. I was going to say it in a courteous yet firm tone of voice, one that would not allow him to answer. Then it struck me as a pretentious cliché. So I just told him to send me the documents as soon as possible. He said that I’d have a complete copy of the entire file that afternoon, and that was the end of our conversation.

To whatever extent possible, it’s best to avoid pretentious clichés, I thought.

That afternoon, someone from Fornelli’s law office came and handed Pasquale a sizable stack of files. Pasquale carried them into my office and reminded me that in about half an hour we had a meeting with the building commissioner from a small town in the surrounding province; our client had received a formal notification that he was under judicial investigation for malfeasance and illegal approval of subdivisions. For all I knew, the building commissioner was a perfectly law-abiding person, but in some small towns politics takes the form of anonymous accusations and complaints with the public prosecutor’s office.

I let the half hour slide by as I leafed through the file without really focusing on it. More than anything else, I felt it. Those photocopies had an aura that planted a deep and terrible sense of unease in me. I thought about the girl’s parents and about how I would have experienced something as horrifying as the death of a daughter. I tried to imagine it, but I couldn’t. It was so staggering that my imagination failed to provide me with a specific depiction of it. I could barely guess at the nature and scope of that horror.

Why would a normal young woman, with a normal life and a normal family, vanish from one moment to the next, without warning, without giving a sign, without leaving the slightest trace?

Was it possible that she had simply left of her own free will and was so heartless as to abandon her family to its anguish and despair? I decided that wasn’t possible.

If she hadn’t left of her own free will, two possibilities remained. Either someone had kidnapped her—but why?—or someone had killed her, intentionally or accidentally, and then arranged to conceal her body.

Those were some brilliant ideas, I thought. Signore and Signora Ferraro and my colleague Fornelli had certainly made the right decision when they hired a latter-day Auguste Dupin like myself.

The big question, though, was this: What could I do? Even if I read the file and managed to find a shortcoming in the investigation, what would the next step be? In spite of my conversation with Fornelli, I had absolutely no intention of hiring a private investigator. There must have been good investigators around, but I’d never been lucky enough to meet one. I had had only two experiences with detective agencies, and they had both been disasters. I’d sworn I’d never make that mistake again.

Moreover, the notion that I might start investigating the matter myself was crazy, crazy but dangerously enticing.

The only serious option, if I did manage to identify a plausible clue of any kind, was to request a meeting with the prosecutor and—very tactfully, because such people were quick to take offense—suggest that he investigate a little further before closing the case once and for all.

When the building commissioner arrived, I was in the
throes of this sort of speculation. Luckily, I now had to think about him and his problems with the law, which distracted me from my tortured logic.

He seemed pretty upset. He was a high school teacher. This was the first time he’d held government office, and this was also his first brush with the law. He was afraid he might be arrested any minute.

I asked him to explain the situation in general terms. I took a quick look at the official notice he’d received and read through a few other documents he’d brought with him. In the end, I told him he could relax: As far as I could tell, there was really no serious evidence of wrongdoing on his part.

He seemed dubious, but relieved. He thanked me and we said our good-byes; I promised to meet with the prosecutor and inform him that my client was entirely willing to come in for an interview and felt sure he could clear up his role in the matter.

One by one, my colleagues—oh, how I dislike that word—came into my office to say good night before going home. This ceremony always makes me feel like a doddering old fool.

When I was finally alone, I called down to the Japanese take-out place a couple of blocks from my office and ordered a truly outsized meal of sushi, sashimi, temaki, uramaki, and a soybean salad. When the woman taking my order over the phone asked if I wanted something to drink, I hesitated for just a moment, then asked for a well-chilled bottle of white wine as well.

“Chopsticks and glasses for two, I imagine,” the young woman said.

“Of course, for two,” I answered.

Forty-five minutes later, I was clearing a jumbled mess of plastic trays, little bottles, chopsticks, empty packets, and napkins off my desk. When I finished, I poured myself another glass of Gewürztraminer, stuck the plastic cork back into the bottle—I hate those plastic corks, but I have to admit that I haven’t had any corked wine since they were invented—and put it in the fridge. Every step performed slowly and very carefully. That’s how I always do things when I am preparing myself to begin a new task that makes me anxious. I do everything I can to delay the moment when I’ll have to begin, and I have to say, I’m pretty creative about it.

They call it a pathological tendency to procrastinate.

Apparently, this is a syndrome that is typical of insecure individuals who lack self-esteem; they continually put off disagreeable tasks in order to avoid being faced with their own shortcomings, fears, and limitations. I read something along those lines once, when I was leafing through a book called
How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Living
. It was a self-help book that explained the syndrome’s causes and then suggested about two hundred pages of crazy exercises to be used—I’m quoting verbatim—“to rid yourself of
this disease of will and live a full, productive life, free of frustrations.”

I thought to myself that I wasn’t all that eager to have such a productive life, that self-help books that tell you how to change your life give me hives, and that a certain amount of frustration really didn’t bother me. So I put the book back on the shelf where I’d found it—as usual I was in a bookstore reading for free—and I bought an Alan Bennett book and went home.

After clearing away every trace of my Japanese dinner, after drinking a little more wine, after checking in vain for new e-mail, I realized the time had come.

I decided to read the file in the chronological order in which the authorities conducted their investigations, beginning with the event in question and moving forward from there. That’s not usually how I go through a file.

If I’m examining a file in which a warrant has been issued and my client is in jail, or under house arrest, the first thing I do is to read the court order for the warrant, which is the last document in the judicial proceedings. If I know the judge who wrote it, I immediately form an opinion about whether it’s a serious matter or not. After the judicial order, I read the other documents, working backward from last to first. I do the same thing if I’ve been hired after a trial verdict has been handed down, meaning first I read the court order that I’m being hired to appeal, and then I read everything else.

But in the case of the missing Manuela Ferraro, I thought it would be best to retrace the investigation as it
developed, through the documents, doing my best to intuit whatever I could about the story behind those documents.