“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.
At last, I opened my eyes again.
A second telephone. Christ, a second telephone. There could be anything on the call records for that phone. A second telephone was such an obvious possibility that no one had even thought of it. It was like Poe’s purloined letter.
I left the office telling myself that I needed to talk it over with Tancredi. He would have known what to do, but he was still in America.
I felt like going to see Nadia, telling her everything, and asking her what she thought, but I immediately discarded that idea. I wasn’t sure why, but after what had happened in Rome, the idea of going to see Nadia made me faintly uncomfortable, as if I’d somehow betrayed her.
Absurd, I told myself.
It’s all absurd.
I tried calling Caterina again, but her phone was still unreachable.
So I went home, laced up my boxing gloves, and punched Mister Bag over and over again. As I paused between one round and the next, I talked to him, asking his opinion about the latest developments in the case. He didn’t say much that evening. He just swung there lazily. Then, finally, he let me know I ought to have something to eat, drink a glass of good wine, and sleep on it. Maybe I’d come up with an idea the following day.
Maybe.
33.
I slept badly and had nightmares. When I woke up, I still didn’t have any bright ideas. I got out of bed feeling grumpy, and things only got worse when I remembered what was on the schedule that morning.
I had an appointment at the district attorney’s office with a client, a physician and a university professor, not to mention an academic power broker, who was charged with fixing a job search and assigning the position to one of his assistants. The other candidate was an internationally respected researcher who had worked for years in the United States at major universities and medical research centers. At a certain point, he had decided to move back to Italy.
When the search for a chair in his field was announced, he applied, unaware that the position had already been assigned and the job search was a farce. The chosen recipient of the chair was a young researcher, a brainless wonder who was lucky enough to be the son of another professor in the same department. He was known in academic circles for his rigorous lack of morals and nicknamed Little Piero the Greedy.
The vastly disproportionate difference in the two candidates’ scientific qualifications-obviously, entirely in favor of the candidate who lacked the inside track-was fairly ludicrous. But that detail was of no interest to the hiring panel, and the brainless wonder was given the position. The better qualified researcher smelled a rat. He took legal action: He appealed to the regional administrative court, won the appeal, and filed a criminal complaint against the professor with the district attorney’s office.