Free Temporary Perfections by Gianrico Carofiglio Page B

because of a failure to serve certain papers, so he’d been able to free himself up almost immediately. Twenty minutes later, he was sitting across from me.
    “Weren’t you in a different office until recently?”
    “Yes, we moved four months ago.”
    “It looks sort of American. Nice. I’d like to make some changes, too. But it’s not so easy if you’re a Carabiniere. You’ve got a fixed income, and you can’t predict your schedule. I was thinking of going back to college.”
    “You’d like to study engineering again?”
    He looked at me in astonishment.
    “Good memory. But no, not engineering. I don’t think I could get up to speed, especially in my spare time. I was thinking of literature, or philosophy. But maybe that’s a pipe dream. It’s just that once you pass age forty, you start to ask yourself some hard questions about the meaning of what you’re doing, and especially about time passing, which it seems to do more and more quickly.”
    “A while ago I read a good book by a Dutch psychologist. It’s called
Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older
, and it talks about that very phenomenon. It’s really interesting.”
    “Just hearing the title makes me anxious. There are times when I feel like I’m losing my balance and falling over. It’s not a pleasant feeling.”
    I knew what he was talking about. In fact, it’s
not
a pleasant feeling. We sat in silence, with those words hanging in the air.
    “All right, let’s forget about time rushing by and mymidlife crisis. You said on the phone that you’re looking into the disappearance of Manuela Ferraro.”
    “Yes. As I told you, her parents came to see me, accompanied by an old civil law colleague of mine. They asked me to examine the file and see if I could find any grounds for further investigation. Last night I read through the documents, and of course the first thing I noticed was that you were in charge of the investigation.”
    He nodded, and said nothing. So I continued.
    “I want to know what you think about her disappearance, aside from what you wrote in your reports.”
    I refrained from asking him explicitly if he thought further investigation was merited. Even a well-balanced and intelligent person like Navarra can be touchy about certain things. I figured something might emerge if we just talked it over casually.
    “It’s never easy to form any solid theory in a missing persons case. In my experience—and I think statistics back me up on this—once a certain amount of time has gone by the percentage of positive outcomes in missing persons cases is very low.”
    He stopped as if he’d just thought of something important.
    “You know that Detective Tancredi is a first-class specialist in this type of investigation, right? He’s built up an incredible body of experience with missing children. I think you know him, don’t you?”
    “Yes, Tancredi and I are friends.”
    “Well, if you’re a friend of Tancredi’s, I’d ask his opinion. I won’t be offended. In any case, aside from what happens in general, you want to know if I have any ideas of my own, above and beyond what’s written in the reports.”
    “That would be helpful, in fact.”
    Navarra pressed his lips together. He scratched the back of his neck. He rocked his head gently from side to side, as if he were weighing the wisdom of confiding in me what he really thought. Then he must have come down on the side of taking the risk.
    “If I had been able to dedicate a lot more time to this case … no, let’s say if I had been able to dedicate all my time to this case, I would have looked into that young woman’s life in Rome. I had the impression that her two friends—Abbrescia and Pontrandolfi—weren’t telling me everything they knew, that they were covering up something, but I don’t know what. Let me be clear: the first target of my investigation was Cantalupi, Manuela’s ex-boyfriend. He’s a spoiled brat, a conceited and overindulged little playboy who