Temporary Perfections (7 page)

It was what’s called a “Form 44 file,” in reference to the papers filed in cases with unknown defendants. Printed on the cover were the name of the missing person, the date of her disappearance, and the classification of the crime—Article 605 of the Italian Penal Code, abduction. This is the only crime heading that can be invoked when a person disappears and there is no evidence to support other, more specific theories.

The first document in the file was the report from the Carabinieri—signed by Inspector Navarra, a non-commissioned officer I knew and respected—informing the prosecutor’s office of the existence of the missing persons report filed by the parents and the transcripts of the investigation’s early interviews.

I began with the statement of the young woman who had taken Manuela to the train station. Anita Salvemini—that was her name—had also been a guest at the
trulli
where Manuela spent the weekend. She’d given Manuela a ride because she was going to Ostuni to meet some friends, but that was the first and only time they’d met.

During the twenty minutes of the short car trip from the
trulli
to the train station, they chatted about inconsequential matters. Manuela told her she was studying law in Rome and said she planned to return to Rome by train later that evening or the next morning.

No, Anita didn’t know whether Manuela was planning to meet someone at the Bari train station, nor did she know if Manuela was seeing anyone, had a boyfriend, and so on.

No, Manuela hadn’t seemed worried to her. Moreover, she hadn’t really observed her carefully for the obvious
reason that she—Anita—was driving the car, and she therefore needed to keep her eyes on the road.

No, she didn’t recall Manuela making or receiving any calls during the car trip between the
trulli
and the Ostuni train station. Manuela may have taken her cell phone out of her purse at some point. Maybe she got a text, or sent one, but Anita couldn’t really say with any certainty.

No, she couldn’t remember exactly how Manuela was dressed that afternoon. She’d definitely had a large dark-colored bag with her, and a smaller purse, and she thought she might have been wearing jeans and a light-colored t-shirt.

No, she couldn’t remember the exact time of their departure from the
trulli
, nor could she remember exactly when they arrived at the train station and she said good-bye to Manuela. They probably left a little after four, which would mean they got there around 4:30.

No, she couldn’t say exactly when Manuela’s train was scheduled to depart. Probably shortly after they arrived at Ostuni, but that was a guess, because she had no memory of having talked about it.

No, she had nothing more to add.

Read, approved, and signed.

After that deposition came the statements of the three friends—two young women and a young man—who’d been at the
trulli
with Manuela. These three statements were short and said basically the same thing: They’d planned to return to Bari on Sunday night. Then, because there was a party, the three friends had decided to stay until Monday. Manuela still wanted to go home on Sunday, as they had originally planned. She told them not to worry, because she’d found a ride to Ostuni, and she planned to catch a train there.

The end.

Then came the statement of the ticket clerk Fornelli had mentioned. The clerk recognized Manuela, though he didn’t know what time she’d come to his window to buy her ticket.

From the report, it appeared that the Carabinieri had checked the schedule for trains departing the station of Ostuni. Manuela could have taken either a Eurostar, an express, or one of two locals between 5:02
P.M
. and 6:58
P.M
.

The Carabinieri had been very thorough and had interviewed the conductors on all those trains: There were ten or so statements—all identical, nearly all useless.

The conductors were each shown a photograph of the girl, and they answered that they couldn’t remember ever having seen her.

Only one, the conductor on the 6:50 train, said that Manuela’s face was familiar. He thought he’d seen that girl before, but he wasn’t sure if it had been on Sunday afternoon or some other time.

There followed a series of transcripts of the statements of the other young people who’d spent the weekend at the
trulli
. None of the statements was even remotely useful. Only one thing caught my attention: The Carabinieri asked everyone whether narcotics had been used over the weekend. Everyone interviewed ruled that out, but no one had been able—or willing—to say whether Manuela ever used drugs, even occasionally.

Then there was the sketchy information obtained from two of Manuela’s friends who were also students in Rome: Nicoletta Abbrescia—the girl who shared an apartment with Manuela—and Caterina Pontrandolfi.

The Carabinieri had asked them about drugs, too. Both
admitted that Manuela might have smoked a joint every now and then, but said she never used anything stronger. Between the lines of the bureaucratic language, there were glimpses of embarrassment and perhaps even reticence, but that was probably normal and understandable, since the conversation was, after all, with the Carabinieri.

But the most interesting part of their depositions concerned a certain Michele Cantalupi, Manuela’s most recent boyfriend. Both young women described a troubled relationship, marked by frequent fights, that came to a stormy end that included verbal and even physical violence.

The Carabinieri reported that in the days immediately following Manuela’s disappearance they had not been able to track down Cantalupi. His parents told them that their son was on vacation, out of the country. The detectives were puzzled by their responses (in the report, they wrote that the parents’ attitude had seemed somewhat evasive), and they requested authorization to pull the records for Cantalupi’s cell phone, as well as those for Manuela’s cell phone and her ATM records. They wanted to see with whom they’d been in contact most recently and more importantly to determine whether Cantalupi really had been out of the country for several days.

One week later, in another long report, the Carabinieri detailed a number of further steps that had been taken in the investigation. First, they had conducted an interview with Michele Cantalupi, who had returned from his vacation in the meantime. Cantalupi confirmed that he had been Manuela’s boyfriend for nearly a year; he confirmed that the relationship had ended badly, but he pointed out that it was all over many months prior to her disappearance, and that in fact they’d been on much better terms lately.
The relationship had ended for a variety of reasons, and Manuela was the one who decided to end it. He admitted that there had been fights, some of them violent. He also admitted that on occasion those fights had taken place in the presence of friends. No, there had never been any assault, no punches thrown. He was informed that one of Manuela’s girlfriends said that during a fight, in her presence, slaps had been exchanged. He admitted that there had in fact been a slap, but said that it had been Manuela who slapped him, not the other way around. He admitted that he shoved her and said she reacted by slapping him. That was the end of it, and that was also the only time there had been any form of physical conflict. No, he didn’t have another girlfriend now. No, he didn’t know whether Manuela was seeing someone else in Rome. He admitted that he had asked her, but she told him it was none of his business. Yes, they had met once, they’d had a cup of coffee together and chatted a while. This was in downtown Bari, in early August. No, there had been no conflict. They had said good-bye amicably.

I found the transcript puzzling. Reading between the lines of the police report, you could see Cantalupi trying to make it all sound normal and peaceful, when, perhaps, it wasn’t completely peaceful, at least not according to Manuela’s girlfriends.

On the other hand, the cell phone records seemed to rule out Michele Cantalupi’s involvement in Manuela’s disappearance. First of all, it was clear that for several days, his phone had been routed through foreign cell networks, so he really had been out of the country. Second, there was no contact—that Sunday or in the days before that—between Manuela and her ex-boyfriend.

Manuela’s cell phone didn’t seem to get a lot of use. The cell phone records covered the week prior to her disappearance: only a few calls and a few text messages, all to girlfriends or to her mother. None of the numbers belonged to anyone outside of her small circle of friends. Nothing unusual, except perhaps for how few calls and messages there were. Taken alone, however, that was not particularly significant.

That Sunday, Manuela had received only two phone calls, and she had exchanged text messages, again, with her mother and with a girlfriend. The last sign of life in the phone records was a text message she sent to her mother in the afternoon. After that, nothing. The cell phone went dead for good.

Her friend was interviewed by the Carabinieri, but she’d been unable to supply any useful information. She’d called Manuela to say hello, since she had to go back to Rome and they hadn’t had a chance to get together in the previous few days. She had no idea what Manuela was planning to do that evening, how she would be getting back to Rome, much less what might have happened to her.

The ATM records provided nothing useful, since the last withdrawal had been made in Bari on the Friday before she disappeared.

In the days that followed, a number of photographs of Manuela, with a description of the clothing she was probably wearing that afternoon, were published in local newspapers and shown on the television program
Chi l’ha visto?
. Some of those photographs were in the file. I looked at them for a long time, searching for a secret, or at least an idea of some kind. Of course, I found nothing, and the only brilliant conclusion that I managed to draw from my
examination was that Manuela was—or had been—a very attractive young woman.

After the photographs were published, as Fornelli had told me and as always seems to happen with disappearances, a number of people—nearly all of them of good candidates for psychiatric treatment—had phoned in and claimed to have seen the missing girl.

The third report showed the effects that publishing the photographs had on an array of mentally unbalanced individuals. There were a dozen or so statements sent from Carabinieri stations all over Italy. They were all declarations from people who claimed, in varying tones of confidence, which in turn correlated exactly to how precarious their mental health was, that they had seen Manuela.

There was the pathological liar Fornelli had mentioned to me who claimed he’d seen Manuela working as a prostitute on the outskirts of Foggia. Then there was a woman who noticed Manuela wandering absentmindedly through the aisles of a superstore in Bologna. There was a guy who swore he’d seen her in Brescia, flanked by two suspicious-looking men who spoke some Eastern European language. They had shoved Manuela into a car, which tore away, tires screeching.

The Carabinieri noted that none of these statements appeared to possess even a shred of credibility. As I read, I thought to myself that I had rarely agreed so wholeheartedly with a police document.

Also in the file were a number of anonymous letters that had been sent directly to the district attorney’s office. They spoke, variously, of the white slave trade, international conspiracies, Turkish and Israeli intelligence agencies, satanic cults and black masses. I forced myself to read them all,
from start to finish, and I emerged from that experience exhausted, dispirited, and with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Manuela had been sucked silently into a vacant and terrifying vacuum on a late-summer Sunday, and I could think of nothing more that might be done to keep alive the desperate hopes of her parents.

I walked over to the fridge and poured myself another glass of wine. I looked back over the few notes I’d jotted down and decided they were useless.

My nerves were on edge, and I seemed unable to control my thoughts. I wondered what the private investigators and police detectives from some of the many American crime novels I’d read over the years would have done in my situation. For instance, I tried to imagine what Matthew Scudder, or Harry Bosch, or Steve Carella would do if he were assigned to this case.

The question was ridiculous, and yet, paradoxically, it helped me focus my thoughts.

The investigator in a crime novel, without exception, would begin by talking to the policeman who conducted the investigation. They would ask him what ideas he might have developed, independently of what he’d written in his reports. Then they would contact the people who’d already been questioned and try to extract some detail that they’d overlooked, or forgotten, or failed to mention, or that simply hadn’t made it into the report.

It was just then that I realized something. A couple of hours earlier, I had assumed that when I read the file, I wouldn’t find any new clues. And in fact, reading the file had only confirmed my suspicions. But I also assumed that I would then report my findings to Fornelli and the Ferraros,
return their check, and get myself out of an assignment that I had neither the skills nor the resources to take on. It would be the only right and reasonable course of action. But in that two-hour period, for reasons I could only vaguely guess at and that I didn’t want to examine too closely, I had changed my mind.

I told myself I’d give it a try. Nothing more. And the first thing I’d do would be to talk to the non-commissioned officer who had supervised the investigation, Inspector Navarra. I knew him. We were friends, and he would certainly be willing to tell me what he thought of the case, aside from what he’d written in his reports. Then I’d decide what to do next, what else to try.

As I walked out onto the street, with a studied gesture I pulled up the collar of my raincoat, even though there was no reason to do so.

People who read too much often do things that are completely unnecessary.

On my way home, I decided to put in half an hour on my punching bag. The idea, as always, made me slightly giddy. I think it might be interesting for a skilled psychologist to spend some time studying my relationship with the heavy bag. Obviously, I punch it a lot. But before I get started, in the pauses between rounds, and especially afterward, perhaps while drinking a cold beer or a glass of wine, I talk to it.