Free Reasonable Doubts by Gianrico Carofiglio

the word - Kawabata, I’d turned into a third-rate imitation of the main character from Play It Again, Sam . The only thing I hadn’t done was scatter a few books of philosophy around, just to look like an intellectual.
    Natsu entered. With her, holding her left hand, was a little girl. She had her mother’s face: the same cheeks, the same mouth, the same colouring, more Vietnamese than Japanese. And amid all that, her father’s blue eyes.
    She was very beautiful.
    The moment I saw her, I felt an acute, incomprehensible twinge of nostalgia.
    “This is Anna Midori,” Natsu said, smiling slightly. Because of the look on my face, I imagine. Then she turned to her daughter. “And this ...” She hesitated for a moment.
    “Guido, my name’s Guido,” I said, walking around the
desk, trying to give the kind of smile that meant, I’m used to dealing with children.
    I was a complete idiot.
    Anna Midori held out her hand solemnly, and looked at me with those incredible blue eyes.
    “How old are you?” I asked, holding her hand in mine.
    “Six. And you?”
    For a moment I was tempted to shave a few years off my age. “Forty-two.”
    This was followed by a few seconds of embarrassed silence. Natsu was the first to speak.
    “Do you think we could leave Anna with your secretary for a few minutes?”
    I thought we could. I called Maria Teresa and asked her if she’d mind keeping an eye on this lovely child for a bit.
    This lovely child. Why was I talking this way? I was about to introduce them, but Maria Teresa interrupted me.
    “Oh, Anna and I already know each other. We were just introduced, weren’t we, Anna? Anna Midori.”
    “Yes. We have the same eyes.”
    It was true. Maria Teresa wasn’t a particularly pretty girl, but she had amazing eyes. Blue, like Anna Midori’s. And Fabio Paolicelli’s.
    “Come on, Anna. I’ll show you a game on my computer.”
    The girl turned to her mother, who nodded. Maria Teresa took her hand and they went out.
    “Are you really forty-two?”
    “Yes. Why?”
    “You don’t ... you don’t look it.”
    I resisted the impulse to ask her how old I looked and told her to take a seat. I walked back behind my desk and sat down.

    “Your daughter is ... very beautiful. I’ve never seen such a beautiful little girl.”
    Natsu smiled. “Do you have children?”
    The question took me by surprise. “No.”
    “Aren’t you married?”
    “Well, that’s rather a long story ...”
    “I’m sorry. I always ask too many questions. It’s a failing of mine.”
    No, don’t say that, it doesn’t matter. If you want me to, I’ll tell you my life story and then you can tell me yours. It’ll be better than talking about work. Which would mean talking about your husband .
    Damn it, what was I getting myself into?
    I shook my head politely. It’s no problem, really.
    “We’re trying to figure out who put the drugs in your car and how. It seems very likely that it happened when the car was in the hotel car park. Do you remember the name of the porter on duty the last night?”
    She didn’t remember. She was usually a bit distracted and didn’t pay much attention to people.
    She would obviously be a great help in our so-called investigation.
    “Apart from the porter, did you notice anything unusual during your stay or during the return journey? When you were on the ferry, did you see anyone you’d already seen during the holiday, staying at the same hotel?”
    She hadn’t noticed anything. She hadn’t even noticed the man who’d stayed at their hotel and then had travelled back on the same ferry. She told me her husband, when he’d talked to her about our conversation, had already mentioned this man and had asked her if she remembered him.

    But she didn’t remember him, probably because she hadn’t really seen him.
    I kept going with my questions a while longer, trying to get her to remember something, anything. Even details which seemed insignificant, I said, could turn out to be