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- Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
One spring afternoon Lorenza, a former lover of Guerrieri, shows up in his office. Her son Jacopo stands convicted of the first-degree murder of a local drug dealer. For the appeal, Lorenza turns to Guerrieri. But he is not convinced of the innocence of Lorenza's son, nor does he have fond memories of how their relationship ended two decades earlier. Nevertheless, he accepts the case; perhaps to pay a melancholy homage to the ghosts of his youth. He soon becomes embroiled in a fascinating judicial process tainted by unreliable testimony and hasty and incomplete police work.
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123
THE MEASURE OF TIME
Gianrico Carofiglio
Translated by Howard Curtis
BITTER LEMON PRESS LONDON
Contents
1
“What do we have today, Pasquale?” I asked as I walked into the office, thinking as I did so, for the umpteenth time, that this was a ritual I was tired of.
“Let’s see… The Colella woman should finally be coming to pay. Then there’s the expert witness in the Moretti trial, the public contracts case – he’s coming to pick up the papers, but says he wants to talk to you for five minutes. And at seven there’s a new client, a woman.”
“Who is she?”
With his usual slight aloofness, Pasquale leafed through the spiral notepad he always carries with him. Each one of us has something that identifies us and with which, assuming we’re aware of it, we identify. For Pasquale it’s his notepad. He buys them himself, without putting them on the practice’s stationery expenses, and he always gets the same ones, an old-fashioned kind to be found only in a dusty and rather heart-warming old stationer’s in the Libertà district. They have rough black covers with slightly red edges, like the ones my grandfather used.
“Her name’s Delle Foglie. She phoned yesterday afternoon and asked for an appointment as soon as possible. She said it’s about something serious concerning her son.”
“Just Delle Foglie?”
“How do you mean, Avvocato?”
“Did she only give her surname?”6
“Just the surname, yes.”
For a few months, so many years earlier that I preferred not to count them, I’d known a girl named Delle Foglie. It was a period very distant in time and extremely distant in my memory. A period I hadn’t thought about since it had happened and then melted away. While Pasquale spoke, vague, unreal memories came back into my mind, almost as if they concerned someone else, events I thought I knew about because somebody had told me about them, not because they’d really happened to me.
“She’ll be here at seven. But if you have other commitments,” Pasquale added, maybe noticing something strange in my expression, “I can call her back.”
“No, no. Seven’s fine.”
Pasquale went back to his post in the waiting room. I thought for a few minutes about this new client and decided she wasn’t the Delle Foglie I’d known before. There was no reason it should be her, I told myself, somewhat irrationally, and dismissed the matter from my mind.
At this point I should have devoted myself to studying the case files for the following day’s hearings. I didn’t feel like it. Nothing new about that: for some years now legal papers had been filling me with a sense of nausea, and the syndrome was getting slowly but inexorably worse.
Somebody once wrote that we should be capable of dying young. Not in the sense of really dying, but in the sense of stopping what we’re doing when we realize we’ve exhausted our desire to do it, or our strength, or when we realize we’ve reached the limit of our talent, if we have any. Everything that comes after that limit is repetition. We should be capable of dying young in order to stay alive, but that almost never happens. I’d often thought that thanks to what I’d earned in my 7profession, of which I’d only spent a small part, I could quit, sell the practice and devote myself to something else. Travel, studying, reading. Maybe trying to write. Anything just to escape the grip of time. Time that kept passing, never changing. Nearly motionless in its daily repetition, yet fading fast.
Time accelerates with age, they say. The thought wasn’t a new one, but that day it had been bouncing around unpleasantly in my head.
At the appeal court that morning, I’d run into a colleague of mine, almost a friend. A civil lawyer named Enrico Garibaldi – “No relation to the general,” he would say like a child whenever he was introduced to someone.
A pleasant guy – you could have a good laugh with him. A really nice person and a good professional too. We’d occasionally hung out together.
“Everything all right, Enrico?” I’d asked him with a smile as I shook his hand. It wasn’t a real question, just something you say. Everything all right? Yes, everything’s fine, and you? Everything’s fine, we really should get together one of these evenings, bye, see you soon.
“Not too good, to be honest,” he replied. And after a brief pause, but before I could ask him anything or even just prepare myself (face, tone of voice, all the essentials), he continued: “My mother died two days ago.”
The air went out of me for a moment, as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, Enrico, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry, forgive me…”
“Don’t worry, Guido. Obviously you weren’t to know. And anyway, I’m ashamed to say this, but it was a liberation. A year of illness had taken away all her dignity. Not just hers, poor thing. Ours, too.”8
He paused. His eyes became watery. I remained silent, basically because I didn’t know what to say. He hesitated, then decided he needed to talk. Maybe he’d been waiting to meet me – well, not specifically me, he’d been waiting to meet somebody and I’d happened to show up – to get things off his chest, at least a little.
“You know, you realize you’re losing your dignity when you become intolerant and irritable, when you actually tell off a person humiliated by old age and illness. A person who doesn’t understand why her children are treating her so harshly.” He couldn’t continue. “Oh shit,” was all he added, his voice breaking. Then his lips quivered and he started crying. I overcame the impulse to look around me to check if anybody was watching us and wondering what was happening. My usual problem with other people’s judgement.
“How about a coffee?”
He stared at me in surprise. Then he sniffed and nodded, a flash of gratitude in his eyes. So we left the courthouse and as we walked he began to tell me about it.
“You know what the worst thing was, Guido? That before she died, she didn’t sleep for ten days. I mean, when she realized she was going to die. Eighty-eight years old and yet, like everyone else, she was scared of dying. The psychologist who helped us, me and my brother, explained it to me. She was scared of going to sleep and not waking up again. That’s why she couldn’t sleep. It’s something I can’t come to terms with, something I find disturbing. When you get to that age you should be resigned, I always thought.”
“Maybe we’re never resigned…”
“No, we’re never resigned.”9
“There’s something Marcello Mastroianni said in an interview when he was already old. It was more or less: ‘I like having dinner with my friends. So why do I have to die?’”
Enrico smiled, nodding as if sharing the sentiment. On the surface, the words were bitter. But perhaps they made him feel less alone with his sadness.
We sat down in a cafe near the courthouse. A fairly awful place which, for that very reason, could almost always guarantee you a free table where you wouldn’t be disturbed.
“Have you ever noticed, Guido, how life seems to accelerate with age?”
“I notice it almost every day.”
“Before her situation got worse, Mamma often said it. ‘I have the thoughts of a young girl and the body of an old woman. Why?’”
I remembered my parents. They had passed away when they were still young, not quite sixty, a few months apart. Almost like Philemon and Baucis, a myth my mother loved. I hadn’t had time to have a proper talk with them. I knew very little about my father and mother. For example, I’d never known if before they met and got engaged, then married, either of them had had someone else. A desperate relationship that had ended tragically, lots of brief affairs, whatever. When I was small I found it completely unimaginable that my father could have touched a woman other than my mother, and more than unimaginable that my mother had touched a man other than my father. On some subjects they were both very bashful. When I was eight and had no idea about matters of sex and reproduction, my father gave me a lecture. It so happened that I’d asked something about eggs. Why in some cases they were normal eggs, the kind we ate – which I liked a lot – whereas in other cases they 10had chicks in them which emerged after a while, as clearly shown in schoolbooks and in comic strips and cartoons. My father explained to me that the presence of the chick depended on whether or not the hen had gone and taken a walk with the rooster. “If the hen takes a walk with the rooster,” he said, “chicks are born. Otherwise, we can eat the eggs.”
The explanation raised many more problems than it solved. While my father went back to whatever he’d been doing, clearly considering his educational duty fulfilled, I was asking myself – and would continue to ask myself for years – nagging questions, like: When exactly did the chick appear inside the egg? Was there a specific itinerary for the walk that would produce this mind-blowing outcome? What happened if the rooster and the hen were shut up in a chicken coop and not allowed to take walks?
With time, I started to have less confused ideas about certain matters, and sometimes I thought of asking my father what had induced him to tell me such a surreal story.
But I didn’t.
I sometimes make an inventory of what my parents left me. Mostly good, even crucial things. For example, a deliberately simple notion of honesty, a concept about which there shouldn’t be subtle distinctions. Respect for others. A love of ideas.
Other things they passed down to me are more ambiguous, and may be positive or negative depending on how they insert themselves in the structure of a personality. Among these is the conviction, as radical as a moral imperative, that you should always get by on your own. I think the precept has a long history, that it comes from an old, almost ancestral, fear of being in debt.11
I reflected on this many years later, when examining my great difficulty in accepting help. Being able to get by on your own is good. Thinking you always must get by on your own, without ever asking for help, is a weakness disguised as a strength. If you don’t know how to ask for help, it generally means you don’t know what to do when it’s offered to you willingly and when it would be moral to accept it (and immoral to refuse it).
“A few months before she died, when she was still lucid,” Enrico went on, “Mamma said something that shocked me.”
“Do you feel like telling me?”
“Yes. She said it was hard for her to imagine the world without her. ‘When you’re young and you think of a world and a time when you didn’t exist, it doesn’t bother you, because history seems to have an implicit direction of travel that leads inevitably to the moment when you burst on the scene. The world without us before we’re here is a long period of preparation. The world without us after we’ve gone, on the other hand, is simply the world without us. As long as it seems a distant thing, we manage to alleviate the dread of that thought. But I know that in a few weeks, a few months at most, I won’t be here any more and the world will still go on, without even a ripple. Without even a tremor. You’ll mourn me, then you’ll have to deal with practical matters and you’ll stop mourning. And anyway you’ll be relieved that all the pain is over. You’ll be able to look away and get on with living. Which is only right. And that’ll be the end of it.’”
I took a deep breath and let the air out. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Agnese. For forty-two years she taught Italian and Latin. Her students loved her. Even now I meet people who 12remember her and say that the reason they’ve learned to love books and reading and so many other things is because of her.”
We stayed in that cafe a while longer. By the time we left, his eyes were no longer red from weeping.
I somehow managed to prepare for the next day’s cases and get through my other afternoon chores.
At exactly seven, I heard the doorbell in the distance – my office is the furthest one from the main door – and half a minute later Pasquale popped his head in, asked if he could show in Signora Delle Foglie, I said yes, and he opened the door wide and admitted a woman.
She was tall and quite slim, with short grey hair, and was wearing a leather jacket that was a little big and shapeless on her.
She came towards the desk and I stood up. She saw the surprise in my eyes.
“Hello, Guido. Don’t you recognize me? Lorenza.”
It was her. If I’d passed her in the street I wouldn’t have recognized her.
There she was in front of me. At this point I knew perfectly well who she was, but equally I didn’t have the faintest idea. It was a feeling I’d never before experienced so intensely, not even when I’d occasionally met old school friends I hadn’t seen for decades who’d turned into fat, bald gentlemen.
Since I didn’t know who she was, I also didn’t know how to greet her. I came round to the front of the desk. She, too, didn’t know how to behave and so we embraced awkwardly, both aware of how forced and unspontaneous the gesture was. There was the smell of a recently smoked cigarette about her, as well as the denser, more unpleasant smell of many 13other cigarettes, smoked one after the other, which had impregnated her clothes and hair and stained her hands and nails with nicotine.
I motioned her to sit down and sat down myself.
“You’re just the same, Guido. It’s almost weird, looking at you. Apart from a few grey hairs, you’re just the same.”
I smiled, embarrassed. I was looking for a way to return the compliment, but couldn’t find one. I thought I’d offend her if I told her too big a lie, like: You haven’t changed either.
When we’d first met, she was almost thirty and I was almost twenty-five. Now she was fifty-seven, she looked older than that, and she was in my office to talk to me about a serious, urgent matter concerning her son.
2
“Before coming here I did my sums. It’s been twenty-seven years.”
“Oh yes,” I replied almost simultaneously, congratulating myself on my effort at originality.
“I’ve often been tempted to drop by and say hello, have a chat. Especially when I read about you in the papers in connection with some trial or other. I’ve even caught sight of you in the street, but I’ve never had the guts to call out to you.”
I’d never noticed her in the street. The last time I’d seen her was September 1987, then she’d vanished from my life. I hadn’t seen her again and hadn’t heard anything about her.
I had assumed – for as long as I’d thought about it – that she’d left Bari, which was something she’d always said she wanted to do. With a slight sense of dizziness, I realized I’d never told anyone about her, or about those months when our paths had crossed. Maybe that was why my memory of her had faded until it had become intangible. As time passes, a memory untold becomes less and less real and gets mixed up with the even more intangible material in our minds: dreams, fantasies, private legends.
I didn’t say any of this.
“What … what do you do for a living?”
“I teach. I do other things too, but basically I’m a schoolteacher.”
“Even back then you did a whole lot of things…”15
“Not quite the same kinds of things… But anyway, that doesn’t matter, I’m not here to talk about me.” Her voice had hardened, as if to protect a vulnerable area.
I shrugged, tried to smile and gave her a questioning look. Her jaw muscles tightened.
“I’m here to see you for a professional reason. Meaning your profession, obviously.”
“What’s happened?”
She hesitated, then her hand went to a pocket of her jacket in an automatic gesture, as if searching for a packet of cigarettes.
“I don’t know how to begin.”
“Going to see a criminal lawyer is almost always an unpleasant experience. A person’s unlikely to feel at ease, but we’re in no hurry. My colleague Pasquale has already told me it’s something to do with your son.”
“My son, yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Iacopo has just turned twenty-five. He’s old enough to have already had quite serious problems with the law – and not just the law.” Before continuing, she breathed in and cleared her throat. “Right now he’s in prison. He’s been there for more than two years. He was found guilty of murder.”
She told me what had happened, and there was nothing good about her story.
Iacopo had always been a problem child – maybe because he’d never really had a father, but who can say? She didn’t go into detail about that and I didn’t ask any questions, just did a rapid mental calculation: he couldn’t have been my son.
In any case, Lorenza continued, ever since he was in high school he’d never stopped getting in trouble. Petty incidents with drugs, fights, stealing from supermarkets, 16two exam failures, beating up the new boyfriend of a girl who’d dumped him. One way or another, she’d managed to help him graduate from school, and he’d even enrolled at university – law, just to be original – but hadn’t done any exams. Instead, he’d been involved in a robbery for which he had been arrested. At that point he didn’t have an actual criminal record and had got away with a suspended sentence. But he hadn’t learned his lesson: Lorenza was sure he sold drugs in discos, and for a long time she’d wondered how to keep him away from bad company.
All this was the introduction. She hadn’t yet got on to the reason she was now sitting in front of me, in my office.
Less than three years previously, Iacopo had been arrested and charged with having killed a guy, in all likelihood his usual narcotics supplier.
There had been a trial in the high court and, in May of the previous year, he had been sentenced to twenty-four years’ imprisonment, plus costs. This, in very broad terms, was the gist of the case.
“Before going into details,” I said, “I have to ask you a question. If Iacopo has already been tried, that means he had a lawyer. We have ethical obligations towards our colleagues and —”
“He died.” I thought I caught a hint of impatience in her voice. “He died a few weeks ago. So I don’t think there are any ethical problems.”
“Who was he?”
He was – had been – Michele Costamagna, an excellent professional, until disease had eaten his brain. Apart from being competent, he had always been able, at least in the days when he’d been at the top of his game, to pull the right strings whenever possible. In the last few years, even before 17the disease, he’d lost some of his appeal because many of his friends – judges, prosecutors, high-ranking officials, senior civil servants – had started to retire and the new ones, especially the judges, were less malleable and not so likely to be members of the city’s exclusive clubs. But in the years when I was a young lawyer, Costamagna was one of the people you had to go to if a case was particularly serious. In most cases, he could patch things up. I’d never heard about anything definitely illegal, but all in all, Costamagna was like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction: he solved problems. And that was why he’d always made sure he was well paid. Beyond the limits of greed, according to some.
A couple of years earlier he had fallen ill, and his decline, which had already started, had grown rapid and increasingly obvious. He would lose the thread during closing arguments, would get confused in cross-examinations and in general throughout hearings; he would sometimes forget the name of his client or that of the judge. In his final weeks, he hadn’t even managed to get to court. He had died just after Christmas, and it was now the beginning of February.
In short, it could be assumed that, at least in his final year, Costamagna’s client hadn’t received – to put it euphemistically – adequate representation. Of course there was the whole apparatus of his practice, the trainees, his daughter, but a murder trial in the high court was the old man’s exclusive prerogative.
So if Iacopo had been represented in the high court by Avvocato Costamagna – by the shadow of what Avvocato Costamagna had been, for good or ill – he certainly hadn’t had the best possible defence.
All this was easy to assume, and it was basically what Lorenza told me. They had gone to Costamagna due to his old 18reputation and on the advice of a relative. He had asked for a whole lot of money, but the defence had been weak, if not actually non-existent, both during the preliminary investigation and in court. After the sentence, he had assured them that things would go differently at appeal. As they always did, he’d added with a flash of his old arrogance. And he had asked for a further advance payment. Costamagna – or more likely one of the colleagues in his practice – had written a motion of appeal a few pages long. Lorenza was no expert, but it had struck her as really weak.
“Then his condition got worse. A couple of appointments were cancelled, and he was admitted to hospital and died.”
“Has the date for the appeal hearing already been set?”
“The first one’s in two weeks.”
“What?” I was aware of a high pitch in my voice that I hadn’t managed to moderate. “Two weeks?”
“Yes. A few days ago I went to Costamagna’s office. I spoke to one of his colleagues, who struck me as an idiot. He asked me for another advance payment. I told him I’d already paid a lot of money and he said that was for the original trial and the drafting of the appeal motion. Now they needed to prepare for the hearing, to evaluate new evidence and decide on what requests to make. He used technical expressions I couldn’t repeat to you. I didn’t understand, and I think he was using them specifically to make sure I didn’t understand.”
“That’s not uncommon.”
“I lost my cool. I told him that after what I’d paid the practice, a lot of it under the table, he couldn’t tell me it still wasn’t enough, and at such a difficult time, when the appeal was about to start.”
“Do you remember who he was?”19
She said a name. A person for whom the definition of idiot was needlessly charitable. I wouldn’t even have given him the role of a lawyer in a school play. I avoided sharing this judgement of mine, just nodded and asked her to continue.
“He told me if we weren’t satisfied with the service provided by the Costamagna practice, we could go elsewhere. Then I really raised my voice. I screamed at him, let out everything I felt. He turned red, and said that if that was the case it was best to suspend our professional relationship and he suggested I leave. Over the next few days I started wondering if it hadn’t been stupid on my part to react in that way. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. Then I thought of you.”
An unpleasant thought wormed its way into my mind. She hadn’t come to me because she thought I was a good lawyer. She’d come to me because she didn’t know which way to turn. She was broke and obviously assumed, considering our shared past, that I would work on credit or, even better, for free. That annoyed me, and I decided to make things clear: I’d already worked as a lawyer for charity too many times.
Dear madam (you’ll excuse the formal tone, which may seem strange to you given that we’ve been naked together in the same bed, but in view of the situation I prefer a certain degree of formality), I will gladly accept the task of examining the case file relating to the legal proceedings against your son. First, however, I would ask you to go to the office outside and pay the deposit indicated by my colleagues. The fact that many years ago we were … intimate for a few months is, unfortunately, irrelevant when it comes to work. Demanding work, I should add: a case that’s already quite compromised and that relates to a rather serious matter. In 20other words, a task that, were I to accept it, would require a great deal of time and effort.
As I was making these rapid, unpleasant observations in my head, it struck me that we hadn’t talked even for a second about the substance of the proceedings. About what the boy was actually accused of, and if he was innocent or guilty.
So I dropped the deposit – and my dignity, and my offended self-esteem – and asked her to sum up the facts of the trial. Basically, what was the charge? And above all, what was the evidence that had led to the conviction?
She told me. And I didn’t like what I heard, didn’t like it at all. From what I understood of her account, which was quite thorough even though she wasn’t an expert, her son was in a bad position. The evidence against him may have been circumstantial, but it was also – in legal jargon – serious, specific and concordant.
“Guido, I’ve come to you because I didn’t know who to turn to. Going to Costamagna was a mistake, I realize that now. But everyone told me he was good, and also well connected. You must know how it feels when you find yourself involved in something like that. It’s like suddenly discovering you have a serious illness. You start to panic, you look for help, you ask around about who might be the best choice and…”
“I know, it’s not easy to see things clearly. And in fact Costamagna was a good lawyer. Maybe even an excellent lawyer. Unfortunately, in his last years, the disease compromised his abilities. What I mean,” I continued, “is that you mustn’t blame yourself for going to him. Quite simply, things deteriorated.”
She nodded, as if to thank me for taking a weight off her shoulders: the feeling that she had made the wrong choice 21and was somehow partly responsible for the way things had turned out. Then she resumed.
“I want to make it clear I’m not expecting you to work for free. It’s just that I don’t have any money right now. To draw up the appeal motion, Costamagna stripped me of my savings, and I’ve even got into debt. I’m only a substitute teacher, and I also make do with other jobs, but it isn’t easy. I promise, though, I’ll pay you what I owe you, I just need some breathing space.”
Strange how our minds work. I’d been annoyed at the idea that she’d come to me because she was broke. And now that she’d said it explicitly, my annoyance had vanished. Once freed from the semi-darkness of my susceptible ego, the whole thing became quite normal, with nothing offensive about it at all.
So, in total contradiction to what I’d been thinking just a little while earlier, I made a gesture with my hand as if to clear the air between us.
“Don’t worry about the money. We can talk about that later. Right now there are a couple of things we need to clarify: one urgent and important, the other very important although less urgent. The urgent one concerns the first appeal hearing. Do you remember the exact date?”
It was only sixteen days away. The legal limit for adding new grounds to the appeal motion and for formulating requests for the submission of new evidence not submitted at the original trial is fifteen days, so there was no time to prepare. Among other things, new counsel still had to be formally appointed, for which the person concerned would have to make a request directly to the prison administration. All we could do was ask for an extension. In certain situations, you can ask the judge not to insist on a time limit that has 22been missed and to assign a new one. But then you need to show that unforeseen circumstances have made it impossible to observe the time limit previously established. In this case, we would have to show that the death of Avvocato Costamagna was the force majeure on which to base our request. It couldn’t be taken for granted that we’d get our extension. Which meant we had an uphill struggle right from the start. I was just in the middle of these thoughts when Lorenza resumed speaking.
“Guido, Iacopo’s innocent. He’s got into a lot of trouble, he’s a difficult boy, some of which may be my fault, but he didn’t commit that murder.”
They all say that, the parents or friends or lovers. My child, my colleague, my lover can’t have done anything like that. Trust me, I know him. If we always believed the nearest and dearest, the crime of homicide (and many others, to be honest) would vanish from the statistics.
I nodded without commenting. Commenting on certain subjects is inadvisable – especially to the lovers, friends and mothers of defendants. But she must have read my thoughts.
“I’m not saying that because I’m his mother. I’m saying it because when the murder was committed Iacopo was with me, at home. You’ll see it in the file: what I said in my testimony is the truth, even though the judges didn’t believe me.”
Okay, this was a little different from the usual statements, like “My son’s a good boy, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.” It remained for me to find out if it was the truth.
A lot of those who are suspected of murder are guilty; many of those who are tried for murder are guilty; very many – the vast majority – of those who are convicted of murder are guilty. That doesn’t mean there aren’t innocent people who are suspected, tried and even convicted. But I can assure you 23there aren’t many of these, not many at all, irrespective of the fact that in many cases they’re acquitted. They’re acquitted because of flaws in the investigations, because of procedural irregularities, even because the defence counsel has been really good. Only in a small number of cases because they’re innocent.
So if Lorenza’s son had been convicted of murder, he was probably guilty.
These were not reflections to share with the mother of an accused man.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll need copies of the papers as soon as possible, tomorrow even. And your son will have to appoint me as his counsel and revoke any previous appointment. Before doing anything I’ll have to call Costamagna’s practice and inform them that I’ve been entrusted with the case.”
“Why?”
“Professional courtesy. That way we pretend to respect each other. Then I’ll go straight to the head of the appeal court and discuss the need to extend the time limit. It isn’t an easy situation, it’s only right you should know that. If the judge won’t bend, we’re in real trouble. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
“No thanks,” was all she said.
I shrugged. “Then I’d say that’s all for now.”
3
The next morning I went to court with my colleague, Consuelo Favia. She was born in Peru and was adopted by a friend of mine, a civil lawyer, when she was four. Her features – olive complexion, very mobile dark eyes, plump cheeks with high cheekbones – clearly show she’s from the Andes, but in every other respect she’s unmistakably a citizen of Bari, and that includes her accent, typical of the downtown area, and her ability to speak in impeccable dialect when necessary. She came to work with me when she was a girl and had just passed her professional exams. Now she’s the senior lawyer in the practice. Every time I think about that – to me she’s still a girl – I feel an unease that I have to dismiss in order to avoid other thoughts flooding in.
As we walked to the courthouse, I told her about my meeting with Lorenza. I omitted telling her that we’d known each other before, I’m not quite sure why.
“What was your impression?”
“Of her or her story?”
“Both.”
I didn’t reply immediately. In reality I wasn’t sure what my impression had been, either of her or of what she’d told me.
Usually in such cases – and in this more than in others – I have two conflicting feelings. One derives from my natural, naive tendency to believe people: the reason why, as a young boy, it was easy for people to get me to drink. The other, 25mistrust, is an intellectual fact, and derives from my knowledge of how things usually are.
“I don’t know,” I replied at last. “She says that when the murder was committed the boy was with her at home. If it’s true…”
“Obviously she testified to that, and obviously the judges didn’t believe her.”
“Yes. We’ll need to examine everything very carefully. When the papers arrive I’ll have copies made of the ruling so that you, Tancredi and Annapaola can read it immediately. Then we’ll meet and decide what to do.”
“You’ll have to ask Judge Marinelli for an extension, otherwise there won’t be much to assess.”
We parted at the entrance to the courthouse. I went off to handle a couple of exciting trials for fraudulent bankruptcy and she to bring a civil action against a stalker. Consuelo is a defence lawyer, but she has the soul of a prosecutor. It’s a lot of effort for her to defend people of whose innocence she isn’t convinced. So we share the tasks in a fairly natural way: I mostly defend accused people, she defends mostly victims, in particular victims of crimes like sexual violence, stalking and abuse. No defendant and no defence counsel is ever pleased to have her on the plaintiff’s side.
When I got back to the office early in the afternoon, a complete copy of the file relating to the case of Lorenza’s son was waiting for me on my desk. Iacopo Cardace, the young man was called. The surname didn’t mean anything to me, so the father probably wasn’t somebody I’d known when the mother and I had been going out together – going out together? What a banal expression, I thought.
There was also an envelope with a handwritten note. 26
This is the case file. Today I went to see Iacopo and told him to appoint you and revoke all previous appointments. You should get the message from the prison as soon as possible.
Thank you.
L.
The handwriting was sharp-edged, elegant, slightly hard to read.
I went out to have a bite to eat in the health food store with canteen attached near the office, resisting the impulse to also have a glass of wine. Then I paid a brief visit to the Feltrinelli bookshop, which was also close by. I wandered between the shelves, which for me is a kind of sedative, nodded to a few people who were often in the shop in the early afternoon, and bought a volume of Kafka’s aphorisms and fragments after reading some of them. Number thirty-eight said: “A man was amazed at how easily he went along the road to eternity; the fact was, he was rushing along it downhill.”
I went back to the office and drew up a plan of action. I’m very good at drawing up plans in order to buy time and put off the moment when I have to really get down to work.
I would get through the dull afternoon chores – mostly appointments, because it was Friday and there were no court hearings the next day – then phone Costamagna’s practice and inform them of developments. I was sure they wouldn’t tear their hair out: a very weak case, and a client unable to make further exorbitant down payments, which were completely unjustified anyway now that the old man was no longer around.
Then I would take the file home with me and take a look at the case. Annapaola had gone to London with two friends. 27She would be back the following Monday. I had no desire to call other people to go out with and I had no desire to go out on my own. It was an ideal evening for starting to figure out what I was getting into.
When I called the Costamagna practice I asked for his daughter, who’d inherited it. She resembled her father only in appearance, which wasn’t a compliment – he’d always been on the large side.
I informed her of the fact that their client Cardace had probably appointed me that morning, even though the message from the prison hadn’t arrived yet.
“I hope everything’s sorted with the payments,” I said, more than anything to see how she reacted.
“I didn’t deal with it. It was Dad and Pinelli” – the man Lorenza had rightly described as an idiot – “but I’m familiar with the paperwork.”
Paperwork. A man who’d been in prison for quite some time and who in all probability would be there for a long time to come. Paperwork. Vocabulary reveals a lot about people, I thought. Then I thought that maybe my reflections were banal. It often happens, I can’t help myself. Mariella Costamagna continued speaking.
“I think there’s still some money pending, but don’t worry. Considering the circumstances, we won’t insist.”
I had to hold back a few rude remarks. If Lorenza had told me the truth about the fees she’d been charged – and I didn’t have many doubts about that, knowing Costamagna – it was a lie to state that there was money pending. Even worse, it was actually obscene. More or less like the use of the word paperwork.
“Anyway, I don’t envy you,” she went on. “It’s an open-and-shut case, Dad said. The kid’s guilty, there’s not much 28you can do. At most try to limit the damage. Maybe, if he confesses, you could get a slightly reduced sentence.”
We hung up and the nasty feeling left by these last words remained with me the whole afternoon, like an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I was seized with a kind of urgency to read the case file and find out how things stood.
I asked Pasquale to make three copies of the ruling. One for Consuelo, one for Annapaola, one for Tancredi.
Annapaola is a private investigator who used to be a crime reporter, and even before that all kinds of other things, not all of them as clear as day. It’s thanks to her that I overcame my entrenched scepticism towards her profession. Until I entrusted her with an investigation and saw the results, I was convinced that private investigators were basically good at three things: finding evidence of marital infidelity, in all its varied and often imaginative forms (they’re almost all good at that); getting defence lawyers in trouble, so that they end up on trial for aiding and abetting; and earning large sums of money without producing any results other than verbose and pointless reports.
Annapaola also deals with investigations into marital infidelity – she has to make a living – but whenever she gets to investigate more serious (sometimes very serious) matters, she’s capable of making the most unexpected discoveries, of getting the most unlikely people to talk. Whether she’s working for the accused or – which, like Consuelo, she prefers – for the victim.
Incidentally, she’s also my girlfriend. More or less. The jury’s still out on the definition. A few months earlier we happened to talk about it one evening at my place, after dinner.
“But do you tell other people I’m your girlfriend, Guerrieri?”29
“I thought you’d forbidden me. So: no.”
“Oh yes. You’re right. Good. I like it when you obey me.” She paused then continued: “But it also bothers me a bit.”
“What does?”
“I thought that if you’d replied yes I’d have been upset. Now that you tell me no I’m more upset. Am I consistent?”
