Gianrico Carofiglio - Temporary Perfections

Instead, I had discovered some things, and I thought I could intuit some others, even if I couldn’t yet seem to make them all fit together. I couldn’t walk away.

I had been turning this concept over and looking at it from different angles for at least a half an hour when Pasquale walked into my room.

“Counselor, there’s a young woman who wants to talk to you. She’s phoned a number of times, but you told us not to put any calls through. Now she’s here, in the office. What should I do?”

Caterina, I assumed. And I felt embarrassed at the idea that she was here, in the office, after everything that had happened. It struck me as an intrusion-yet another intrusion-and I didn’t know how to react.

“It’s Signorina Salvemini, concerning the Ferraro case.”

Salvemini? Anita. What could Anita want?

“That’s fine, Pasquale. Please send her in. Thank you.”

Anita was dressed exactly the same as the last time I’d seen her. That clothing seemed to be a sort of uniform for her.

“I tried to call you on the cell number you gave me, but it was always turned off.”

“Sorry. I’ve had an incredibly busy afternoon, so I turned it off.”

“Sorry if I’m bothering you, but I remembered something and I wanted to tell you. It’s probably nothing, but you said to call you if I remembered anything, anything at all.”

“You’re not bothering me, absolutely not. And I’m glad you came by. I really appreciate it. What did you remember?”

“Manuela had two phones.”

“Excuse me?”

“I remembered that Manuela had two cell phones, not just one.”

“Two cell phones.”

I processed this piece of information. It seemed like it could be important. The call records in the prosecuting attorney’s official file were for only one phone number.

“What made you remember that?”

“I told you that during the drive from the trulli to Ostuni, Manuela kept fooling around with her cell phone, and that at a certain point I thought she might have received a message.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“When she received the message, she was holding a phone in her hand, but then she rummaged through her purse to find another phone. The scene came back clearly to me because this morning I happened to hear a cell phone that had the same message alert tone as Manuela’s phone-the sound I heard that afternoon in the car.”

“What sound was it?”

“It was a strange noise. Like a small glass object-a light bulb or a tiny bottle-breaking. I had forgotten that sound, but it came back to me when I heard it again. It was as if hearing the sound allowed me to recover the rest of the memory.”

She said the last few words almost apologetically. Either apologizing for giving me a piece of unimportant information, or apologizing because she was coming up with an important piece of information too late.

“Do you think you could describe the two cell phones?”

“No, I can’t. I was driving. But she was definitely doing something with one of the phones, then I heard this sound of breaking glass, and then she pulled out another phone. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she was holding two cell phones. But I couldn’t tell you what kind of phones they were.”

My mind was racing. Then I realized I’d been sitting across the desk from her for a long time without saying a word, and I must have had a pretty strange expression on my face.

“Anything else you want to tell me?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Thank you, Anita. Thank you so much.”

“Do you think it will help?”

“Yes, I think it very well might.”

I walked her to the door of the office. I shook her hand very warmly and said good-bye, doing my best to control the excitement that was starting to sweep over me.

Why had no one mentioned this other phone to me?

No, that was the wrong question. I hadn’t asked any specific questions about the possibility of a second cell phone, and so it was understandable that no one mentioned it to me. The real question was why the Carabinieri and the district attorney didn’t know anything about it, and why they hadn’t gotten the call records for Manuela’s second cell phone.

Then there was a more urgent question: What was I going to do with this information?

The most natural and normal thing would have been for me to call Navarra immediately and tell him. Of course, I realized that would mean I’d be cut out of the rest of the investigation. So then I told myself, of course, I ought to hand the information over to the Carabinieri, but first maybe I should investigate a little myself. A stupid idea. The Carabinieri could easily find out whether Manuela had another cell phone in her name by simply making a blanket request to all the providers. I couldn’t. Still, I felt it was my investigation, and I didn’t want to hand it over to someone else now that I was finally on to something.

The first thing to do was to call Caterina and ask her if she knew Manuela had had a second phone. I called her repeatedly, but I couldn’t get through to her phone. For a moment, I considered looking up her home number in the phone book-I knew her address-and trying to call her there, but I discarded the idea when it occurred to me that her mother or her father might answer.

Then it occurred to me that I could call Manuela’s mother. Call her directly, without talking to Fornelli. I was feeling energized, and I wanted to move quickly.

Her cell phone number-hers, not her husband’s-was written in the file and I called her immediately, without stopping to think about it. Her phone rang several times, and just as I was about to hang up, she answered.

“ Buona sera, Signora, it’s Counselor Guerrieri.”

There was a moment’s hesitation, a brief silence. Then she remembered who I was.

“Counselor, buona sera!”

For an instant, I was on the verge of asking her how she was doing.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I just wanted to ask you a question.”

“Yes?” Suddenly she sounded both hopeful and nervous. I wondered if it had been a good idea to give in to the impulse to call her.

“I wanted to ask you whether Manuela might have had more than one cell phone.”

There was a long pause. So long that I finally checked that she was still on the line.

“Yes, forgive me. I was thinking. Manuela likes phones. She’s always getting new ones. She likes to play with them, you know, photographs, videos, music, video games.”

“But you don’t know if she had a second phone number.”

“Well, that’s why I was trying to think. She certainly had a number of different cell phones, and over the years she’d had a lot of different phone numbers, too. But when she disappeared, she only had one. She’d only had one number for quite a while, at least as far as I know. Why are you asking? Have you found out something?”

It had definitely been a bad idea to call her. I should have waited until Caterina was reachable.

“It’s only a theory. Only a theory. And almost certainly a theory that won’t lead anywhere. I don’t want you to get-” I was going to say that I didn’t want her to get her hopes up, but I caught myself just in time. “I don’t want you to get any expectations that we’re about to discover anything. I’m working on a few leads that I still have to check out. I’ll let you know.”

There was another pause. A long and painful one.

“Is Manuela alive, Counselor?”

“I don’t know, Signora. I’m very sorry, but I have no way of answering that question.”

Then I said a hasty good-bye, as if I were eager to escape from a dangerous situation. I closed my eyes and ran my fingers through my hair. Then I ran them lightly over the surface of my face, feeling my eyelids, the ridge of my nose, the whiskers that had sprouted on my face since I’d shaved that morning. The friction made a prickly sound.