I put my notes in order. More than that, I tried to get my ideas in order.
For Paolicelli to have a chance of getting out of this – which was very unlikely-I would have to do a bit of investigating, and that was where the problems started.
I’d only ever used private detectives a couple of times, with disastrous results. And that was in cases which were – how shall I put it? – a lot less problematic than the Paolicelli case. After the second time, I had sworn it would also be the last.
I realized I’d have to talk to Carmelo Tancredi.
Carmelo Tancredi is a police inspector who specializes in hunting down the worst dregs of humanity: rapists, sexual abusers, child traffickers.
He has the mild, slightly downtrodden appearance of a Mexican peasant in a B-western, the kind of intuition you usually only find in fictional policemen, and the grip of a crazed pitbull.
I’d talk to him and ask him what he thought of this whole business. If it was really possible that someone had planted the drugs in Paolicelli’s car in Montenegro with the intention of retrieving them in Italy. And I would ask him if he thought it was worth conducting an investigation to try and clear my client.
Then I would ask around to see if anyone knew this lawyer, Macri. To find out where he fitted into the jigsaw.
Assuming, of course, that there was a jigsaw. There could be a much simpler explanation: the drugs did in fact belong to Paolicelli and some unknown accomplices, the lawyer – as often happens in these cases – had been hired and paid by these accomplices, and his wife, of course, knew nothing about it.
The fact that I now had a plan – talking to Tancredi, inquiring about this Macri – gave me the feeling that I’d actually got somewhere. I looked at my watch and realized it was two in the morning.
For a moment, only for a moment, I remembered Margherita’s face. Before it dissolved into the photographic negative of that September afternoon, and then disappeared in the distance, somewhere to the west.
Great Friday night, I thought as I left the office and headed home.