“So what are we going to do? I don’t have anything scheduled in the next few days, so as far as I’m concerned we can go to Rome tomorrow, if you want.”
“I have an important hearing tomorrow that I can’t miss. The day after tomorrow, though, we could go.”
“How should we get there?”
“Well, I’d say it’s best to fly, if we have to go and come back on the same day. We can fly up first thing in the morning, meet with Nicoletta, and then fly back in the evening-we can catch the last flight. Of course, I’ll take care of the tickets and any other expenses.”
“Well, we don’t necessarily have to do the whole trip in one day. I’ll call Nicoletta and ask her when we can arrange the meeting. Depending on when she’s free, we can decide when to leave and whether we’re going to stay overnight in Rome.”
Her tone of voice was very calm and relaxed, the tone of someone who’s just organizing a routine business trip. And yet the idea that we might have to stay overnight in Rome, together, took my breath away.
Caterina tried calling Nicoletta, but her phone must have been turned off, so she sent her a text message.
“If it’s all right with you, as soon as Nicoletta gets back to me, I’ll call you and let you know what she says, and then we can decide.”
“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?”