34.

I wondered if it would be best to wait. Then I immediately decided it would not.

So I called Caterina. She answered on the second ring, sounding cheerful.

“Ciao, Gigi. How nice to see your name on my cell phone.”

“Ciao, how are you?”

“Fine. In fact, now that you’ve called me, I feel wonderful. I saw that you called me last night, but I turned off my phone. I was exhausted.” She paused, giggled, then resumed speaking. “I went right to bed like a five-year-old girl. This morning I tried to call you several times, but I couldn’t get through.”

“I was in court. I just got back to my office. Listen, I was thinking …”

“Yes?”

“What do you say if I come by and pick you up and we go get something to eat somewhere along the coast?”

“I’d say yes, what a fantastic idea. I’ll run and get ready. I’ll see you in twenty minutes. I’ll wait for you downstairs, in front of my building.”

I pulled up exactly twenty minutes later, the time it took to get the car out of the garage and drive to her house. I was just double parking to wait for her when she emerged from the apartment building. She was all smiles as she climbed into the car. She leaned over, kissed me, then fastened her seat belt. She seemed to be in an excellent mood, even happy. She was truly beautiful. Mental images of our night in Rome flickered before my eyes for a moment, like still images edited for subliminal effect into a feature film about something else—a movie that did not have a happy ending. It took my breath away, sadness and desire mixing cruelly.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“How about we go to La Forcatella and eat some sea urchin?”

La Forcatella is a little fishing village on the coast to the south of the city, just beyond the line between the provinces of Bari and Brindisi. It’s famous for its excellent sea urchin.

The car ran with silent precision along a highway surrounded by fields. The clouds were magnificent and clean; the scene looked like an Ansel Adams photograph. Spring was bursting out all around us, and it communicated a thrilling, dangerous euphoria. I did my best to focus on my driving and on the individual acts involved—shifting up and down, gently hugging the curves, glancing up at my rearview mirror—and I tried not to think.

There weren’t a lot of people in the restaurant, so we were able to get a table overlooking the water. Just a few feet from us, the waves lapped delicately at the rocks. The air was fragrant, and on the horizon a clear and perfect boundary was visible where the deep blue of the sea pressed up against the light blue of the sky.

Damn, I thought to myself as I sat across the table from her.

We ordered fifty sea urchins and a carafe of ice-cold wine. A little later, we ordered another fifty and another carafe. The sea urchins were plump and delicious, their orange flesh offering up their mysterious taste. Between the sea urchins and that cold, light wine, my head began to spin slightly.

Caterina was talking, but I paid no attention to her words. I listened to the sound of her voice. I watched the expressions on her face. I looked at her mouth. I wished I could have a photograph to remember her by.

An absurd thought—but it set a chain of other thoughts in motion, including the idea of just dropping everything. For a few minutes, in fact, I thought that was what I’d do. I’d forget what I’d figured out. For those few minutes, I experienced a feeling of complete mastery, a perfect, unstable equilibrium. The kind of perfection that belongs only to things that are temporary, destined to end shortly.

I remembered a holiday road trip in France, many years earlier, with Sara and some friends. We arrived in Biarritz and fell in love with the beach town’s timeless atmosphere, so we decided to stay. That was where I first took a few surfing lessons. After trying countless times, I finally managed to stand up on the board and ride a wave for three, maybe four seconds. In that instant I understood why surfers—real surfers—are obsessed, why the only thing they care about is getting up on a wave and riding it for as long as possible. To hell with everything else. Nothing could be more perfect than that temporary experience.

As I sat listening to the sound of Caterina’s voice and savoring the sweet and salty taste of the last few sea urchins, I felt as if I were on a surfboard, riding the wave of time, for an endless, perfect instant.

I wondered what it would be like to remember that moment. That’s when I fell off the wave and remembered why I was there.

Soon after that, we got up from the table.

“What have you decided to do next?” she asked, as we were walking toward the car.

“About what?”

“About your investigation. You mentioned that you wanted to show pictures of Michele to a drug dealer.”

“Oh, right. I was thinking of doing that, but I’m still trying to figure everything out. Turns out, it might not be necessary. I thought of something else.”

“What?”

“Let’s get in the car and I’ll tell you about it.”

The car was parked facing the beach, in a gravel lot that’s always packed with cars in the summer. That afternoon, it was deserted.

“First I want to smoke a cigarette,” she said, pulling her colorful cigarette case out of her purse.

“You can smoke in the car, if you want.”

“No, I hate the smell of cigarette smoke in my own car, so I can only imagine how gross it must be for someone who doesn’t even smoke.”

I was about to tell her that I’d been a smoker for years, and that I hated the smell of smoke in the car, too, even back then. Then I decided that the time had come to deal with things.

“I need to ask you something.”

“Go on,” she said, exhaling her first drag of smoke.

“As far as you know, did Manuela have two cell phones?”