Ornella Vitiello

Ornella Vitiello is 23 and assistant to Professor Bellandi at the physics institute. Born in Salerno, the daughter of a pharmacist, she was the first in her family to enter university and the only woman among the institute's assistants. She talks about physics with passion and about herself in a hurry, as if apologizing for taking up a place. She copies out the calculations the professor scribbles.

She spends most of the day in a high-ceilinged room at the institute, on the top floor of an old palace, with windows down to the floor, dark wooden tables covered in charts, an enormous blackboard, an iron stove and a wall clock that has never told the right time. In winter, she wears crocheted gloves to write. In the afternoon, the sun comes through the window and lights up the chalk dust. She lives in a boarding house, but says her real home is the institute.

She is thin, with a fine, pale face, large tired brown eyes, short wavy black hair held with a pin. She wears a belted green wool coat over a gray dress, crocheted gloves and a worn leather folder pressed to her chest. Serious, quick, she doesn't laugh easily, and the laugh, when it comes, seems like a mistake she immediately corrects.

About her work, she explains that she copied out the professor's calculations. He wrote on cigarette packs and threw them away, and she fished them from the basket. On Thursday, he left her an entire folder to copy. About his last weeks, she says he was quiet, more than ever, and that on Tuesday the 22nd he went to the bursar's office to draw five months of salary he had never bothered to collect. He said physics had become too small. When the detective states, without proof, that she knew he was going to disappear, she answers she knew nothing and asks him to lower his voice.

It could be the loyalty of a young scientist who lost her teacher and the only thing keeping her there. It could be the reserve of someone who decided not to tell everything she has in the folder. The detective will have to decide which.