The drive home from Verona had been slow. On the highway, Liguori had kept the car in the right lane and motored along at a moderate speed.
“And this time, I get to choose the soundtrack: Sarah Vaughan. With all due respect to Mozart. Okay with you?”
“Sure, but lower the volume.”
“But she’s whispering.”
“Not to my ears.”
Blanca decided that he actually had spoken softly the night before, when he asked her: Let me see you. Just for a few seconds. For a moment.
She needed to tidy up that confusion, she needed to reestablish a provisional before that she could never regain.
“Liguori, nobody’d better find out about this at the office. Or anywhere else.”
“You’re forgetting that I’m a knight and a gentleman. I may lack a horse, but with me chivalry isn’t dead, as our boss likes to say.” The detective was mortified, a tad, by the relief her request had brought him.
“Well, what do you think, was the trip useful?” asked Blanca.
“Extremely.”
“In terms of work, I mean.”
“I’ll lie to Martusciello, but the trip to Verona didn’t do us a bit of good, and I knew it wouldn’t before we left. The place that most of my questions lead to isn’t Verona, but Naples. Why can’t we find the recording of Vialdi’s last show? I’ve looked for it everywhere. It hasn’t done any good. And yet the singer wanted to use the recording for a live album.”
“Live.”
“Live, yeah. How could he have known that he was going to be dead in just a few hours?”
Not even Blanca knew. Liguori thought of her “yes”: she’d covered her face with her hands and had given him a moment in which to indulge in the pleasure of watching her. He couldn’t know that he’d lit a central beam of light, powerful and pitiless, and had laid eyes everywhere. Everyone has their own way of dealing with confusion.
Despite the harshness of the spotlight, a bit of harmony still survived, the motionless white body preserved shreds of grace, even after the haste and sweat of the gestures.
“...but you’re not getting it from me and no one needs to say you’re on again.” Blanca out of tune singing Sarah Vaughan. “Have you been to the Auditorium too?”
“Yep, and it’s not in the archives. They told me that the recording technicians weren’t staff. Whether they were outside professionals or staff, I can’t understand why there isn’t the slightest trace of the concert.”
“Maybe it wasn’t much to write home about.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Martusciello.”
“Maybe they were planning other shows and the technicians, who might not have been on staff, decided for some reason to postpone the recording to another night. What do I know, too much applause, too much external noise, some malfunction.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, it might be. But why wouldn’t they have told me?”
“Maybe it strikes them as unimportant. When Vialdi died, a lot of people lost their jobs, and now they have other things to worry about. Maybe there are people who think of work as something more than a place to work on puzzles.”
“Yep, you’ve been spending too much time with Martusciello.”
“Now I’ll call him, so I can tell him all about Verona and the time we wasted.”