At that point, I was faced with the problem of how to ask Fornelli for a picture of Cantalupi, and it struck me as absurdly challenging.
The minute I asked him for it, he, very reasonably, would ask me why I wanted it. I didn’t feel like answering that question, because I didn’t want to explain what I was doing. Not right now, anyway. Maybe I was embarrassed to tell him that I’d started digging around in the world of drug dealers, where I obviously had a number of useful contacts. Maybe I was afraid that my ambitions as a would-be private investigator might blow up in my face with an actionable defamation of someone—Cantalupi—who might have absolutely nothing to do with Manuela’s disappearance or with dealing drugs. Or maybe I was uncomfortable with the idea that Fornelli might speak to Manuela’s parents and, in order to explain his request, tell them that there was good news—that Guerrieri, that old bloodhound, was on someone’s trail. That he might get their hopes up for no good reason. Or maybe it was much simpler. Maybe I just didn’t want Quintavalle to take a look at the photograph and say that he had no idea who the guy was, bringing a sudden end to my brilliant investigative lead.
So I let the weekend go by without calling him.
On Monday, I was returning to my office after a hearing that had dragged on longer than expected. It was too late for lunch but also too early for my first appointment, so I went over to the Feltrinelli bookshop, had a cappuccino, and bought a book. It was called The Mysteries of Bari, and the flap copy promised that the book revealed a number of the most incredible urban legends of Bari, with descriptions of the unsettling historic events that had engendered those legends.
As I walked out of the bookstore, planning to loaf around for another half an hour or so, I saw Signore Ferraro, Manuela’s father, coming toward me.
He was walking briskly, looking straight ahead, directly at me, and for a moment I thought he was coming to tell me something. I put on the expression you use to say hello to someone, and the muscles in my right arm tensed in preparation for a handshake.
But Ferraro literally looked right through me, and a few seconds later he strode past me, without seeing me. His expression—which appeared vigilant but in reality was distracted, remote—gave me the shivers.
I turned and watched him for a few seconds and then, almost against my will, I began to follow him.
At first I followed him cautiously, but before long I saw that he wasn’t paying the slightest attention to his surroundings. He never looked behind him, and he never looked to either side. He walked at a good pace, and the gaze that had pierced me without seeing me was directed straight ahead, into the void. Or maybe somewhere even worse.
We reached Via Sparano and he turned right, toward the train station.
I didn’t even bother to ask myself just what I thought I was doing, or why. I was in the throes of a feverish instinct that drove me to follow him, without thinking about it.
Once I was sure that he wouldn’t have noticed me even if I had jumped in front of him, right into his path—he would simply have walked around me and continued on his way—I became more daring and started following right behind him, practically walking at his side, just a couple of yards away from him.
Someone watching the scene from a certain distance might even have thought that we were walking together.
As we walked, a remarkable thing happened. I felt as if I could envision the entire scene—including myself—from an outside vantage point. It was a strange, dissociated vision, as if I were standing on a balcony on the second or third floor of a building behind us.
I didn’t like what I saw. Sometimes you see a photograph that has been manipulated on a computer: Everything is black and white, but in the middle there’s a patch of color—an object, a detail, or a person. The scene I was looking at was the other way around. Everything was normal, in full color, except for a weird entity in the middle, in black-and-white, almost glowing, and deeply sad. That entity was Manuela’s father.
It only lasted for a few seconds, but it made the blood run ice-cold in my veins, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.
We walked through the gardens of Piazza Umberto, passed the university, and reached Piazza Moro. There he stopped for a moment near the fountain, downwind of it, and it struck me that he wanted the spray to splash him. Then he continued past the fountain, walked into the station, strode confidently over to the underpass, descended the steps, walked around a panhandler, and then went up the stairs to Track 5.
There were people waiting all along the platform. I looked up at the display panels to see which train they were waiting for. Then I knew for sure what I had already guessed to be true.
Ferraro sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. I felt an urge to go over to him and ask for a cigarette so we could smoke together. He had a pack of Camels, and I really would have loved to smoke a Camel right then, to burn—along with the tobacco and the cigarette paper—the viscous, choking sadness that had infected me like a disease.
Then I thought: I shouldn’t be here at all. It’s not nice to spy on people in the best of circumstances, but peering into the inner recesses of a human being driven mad with grief is cruel and dangerous. Grief can be contagious. Still, I stayed there. I stood, in my gray suit holding my lawyer’s briefcase, and I waited for the train from Lecce, Brindisi, Ostuni, and Monopoli to pull into the station. I waited for Signore Ferraro to walk the length of the platform, examining, one by one, each of the passengers getting off the train. I waited for the doors to close and the train to pull back out of the station, and I had to restrain myself from following him again when he walked back into the yawning shadow of the steps down to the underpass and vanished.
When I emerged from the train station onto the piazza, I turned my cell phone back on. I’d turned it off during the hearing and then forgotten about it. Subconscious self-defense, I guess.
There were a lot of calls and quite a few text messages. One of the text messages read
Yr tel always off i talked to nicoletta call me & i’ll tell u all abt it luv caterina.