I stayed behind, holding my sister by the hand, until a nice lady came up to us and said we had to go with her.
We were taken to an office. There was a man there, and the lady asked us if we wanted something to eat. My sister said yes, I said no thanks, I wasn’t hungry. They brought her a ham roll and a Coke, and when she’d finished eating they asked us questions. They wanted to know if anyone had come to see our daddy, if we had seen any strangers entering our block, anything like that. I asked if they could take my sister out, because I had some things to tell them. They looked at each other and then the lady took my sister by the hand and took her out of the room.
By the time she came back, I was already telling my story. I told it all, calmly, starting with that summer morning and finishing the Thursday before Good Friday.
Calmly, without feeling anything.
33
I lit my third or maybe fourth MS and gratefully felt the smoke split my lungs.
Claudia told me the rest. What happened afterwards. The years in reformatory. Her schooling. Sister Caterina, who worked there as a volunteer and came almost every day to see the boys and girls who were confined there. She was an unusual nun, different from the others. She dressed in normal clothes, she was young, she was friendly, she was determined not to talk about religion, and she befriended little Angela. The only inmate who was there for a murder, committed before her fourteenth birthday. Confined to reformatory as a security measure because she was under fourteen years of age, and couldn’t be charged with a crime. And because she was dangerous.
Sister Caterina taught a lot of things to that strange, silent child, who minded her own business and didn’t make friends with anyone. She brought her books, and the girl devoured them and kept asking for more. She taught her to play the guitar, she taught her to make really nice desserts. She taught her first aid, because she was a nurse.
One day, as they were chatting together in the courtyard of the reformatory, the girl, who was now a young woman, told the sister that she didn’t want to be called Angela any more. She’d soon be leaving the reformatory and she wanted Sister Caterina to give her a new name. For outside. For her new life.
The sister was disturbed by this request and told the girl she would have to think about it. When she came back the next time, the first thing the girl asked her was whether she had her new name. Sister Caterina said her mother’s name was Claudia. The girl said it was a beautiful name, and from now on she would be called Claudia. Sister Caterina was about to say something, but then didn’t. She took off the little wooden crucifix she always wore – the only visible sign that she was a nun – and put it round the girl’s neck.
When she left the reformatory, Claudia was entrusted to a family in the north, because she had said she didn’t want to go back to live with her mother. She took a vocational course, gained a diploma, got a job, started practising martial arts. Karate first, then that lethal discipline invented centuries earlier by a nun.
One day, she heard they were looking for volunteers to lend a hand in a community that provided a shelter for ex-prostitutes and abused women. She applied, and at the interview she said she was a nun. Sister Claudia, from the order of Lesser Franciscans. Sister Caterina’s order.
“I don’t know why it came into my head to say I was a nun. I couldn’t explain it even now. Maybe, unconsciously, I thought if I was a nun I’d be safe. I don’t mean physically. I’d be safe from relationships with people. I’d be safe . . . from men, maybe. I thought everything would be easier, that I wouldn’t have to explain a whole lot of things.”
She turned to look at me, passed her hand over her face, then continued.
“I know what you’re thinking. Wasn’t I afraid of being found out? I don’t know. The fact is, nobody ever doubted I was really a nun. It may seem strange, but that’s the way it is. It’s funny. Say you’re a nun and nobody thinks of checking if you really are. Nobody asks for your papers. Why should a woman pretend to be a nun? People accept it and that’s it. If anyone asks you how come you never wear a habit, you just say it isn’t compulsory in your order, and that’s the end of it. So before you know it, everyone thinks you’re a nun.”
Another pause. Again, she passed her hand over her darkened face.
“It felt comfortable. It was my way of hiding while still being in the middle of people. It was my way of protecting myself. It was my way of escaping, while staying in the same place.”
There wasn’t much else to tell. She’d started working in that community. It was part of an association that had branches all over Italy. When she heard they were planning to open a new refuge near Bari, and were looking for someone with experience to work there full time, for a small salary, to get the community started, she applied.
When she finished her story she asked me for a cigarette. I was strangely glad that she did and that I could give her one and take another one myself and we could smoke together, in silence, while from time to time the sounds of cars could be heard coming closer, passing our car park, and speeding off into the distance.
“There’s a dream I have once or twice a year. He’s calling little Angela from the bedroom, that summer morning. Little Angela goes in, he makes her close the door, makes her sit on the bed, and at that moment the door opens again and Sister Claudia comes in. To save the child. But she never does, because just then I always wake up.”
She turned the cigarette, almost completely burned down now, between her fingers. She looked at the embers, as if they hid a secret, or an answer.
“Once I even dreamed that someone brought my dog Snoopy to the refuge. It wasn’t dead, it had just run away.”
She gave a kind of smile, half closing her eyes, trying to see something in the distance.
There was a catch in my throat and I had to force myself to swallow.
“You know, back in the reformatory, Sister Caterina gave me a poem to read, by a woman poet, I can’t remember her name. She was English, or maybe American. It was dedicated to a mongrel, like Snoopy. It started: If there isn’t a God for you, there isn’t a God for me either.
“That’s nice.” As I said this, I realized they were the first words I had uttered since we’d sat down on that bench, in that service area, on that autostrada. I felt a strange sense of peace as I said it. She took my hand and held it tight, without looking at me.
But I looked at her.
She was weeping silently.
Before we got back in the van I found a litter bin and threw away the cigarettes and the lighter.
Claudia said she would drive, and she got me back home in less than an hour.
She held my hand again for a while, before she said goodbye. Outside, the night was starting to be less dark.
When I got in, the first thing I did was clean my teeth, to take away the taste of the cigarettes.
Then I opened all the windows, took out an old, rare vinyl disc and put it on the turntable.
The cool wind of dawn was blowing through the apartment, and I leaned back in the rocking chair just as the first crackly notes rang out.
Albinoni’s famous adagio. Over those notes, as if coming from another dimension, the mysterious speaking voice of Jim Morrison.
34
Scianatico was arrested for kidnapping and murder. And resisting a police officer of course, since, according to the written statements, he’d tried to fight the policemen who were bursting into the apartment to arrest him.
According to the autopsy, Martina had died from a number of violent blows – punches, probably – to the head and a knock against a hard surface. A wall or the floor. The medical expert said that Martina was probably still alive when she was dragged into the building and then into the apartment.
In the trial that followed with unusual haste, Scianatico was again defended by Delissanti, who tried everything he could to have him declared incapable of understanding and free will. His expert witness mentioned a psychotic imbalance that had triggered the attack and the mur
der, a failure to process feelings of grief for the end of the relationship, a serious depressive syndrome when the patient realized what he had done, and a whole lot of bullshit like that. Scianatico tried to confirm the diagnosis with two highly dubious suicide attempts in prison.
But the court-appointed psychiatrist didn’t buy it. He said the two suicide attempts were simulated acts and concluded his evaluation with the comment that the defendant was an individual with “. . . a compulsive need for control, a very low tolerance for frustration, a borderline personality structure, and a narcissistic disorder . . . but technically capable of understanding (in the sense of being perfectly aware of the significance of his actions) and free will (in the sense of being able to make decisions freely and to choose his own behavioural patterns) ”.
And so, after a three-month trial covered in relentless detail in the newspapers and on television, Scianatico was found capable of understanding and free will and was sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment, the charge of voluntary homicide being reduced to one of manslaughter. In plain language: he went there to beat her up but didn’t intend to kill her.
Technically, a correct decision, but the first thing I thought when I read the news in the papers was that the bastard would be out on day release within seven or eight years. Provided they didn’t reduce his sentence at the court of appeal.
But the court of appeal didn’t give him any more reductions. In such a notorious case, with so much media attention, nobody wanted to risk being accused of favouritism towards Judge Scianatico’s son.
Actually, that was former Judge Scianatico’s son. The old man had taken leave of absence immediately after the murder and then, without ever returning to work, retired.
Caldarola never saw our civil case through to the end. A few months after the final events he was transferred to the court of appeal, and so the trial had to start again with another judge. This time, Delissanti chose what you might call a tamer line of defence. With the murder trial in progress, it was not in their best interests to go over, yet again, the things Scianatico had done before, especially with the journalists making so much noise. It was not in their best interests to talk about the fights, the violent sex, the harassment, the stalking, or the things the murder victim had been subjected to in the months and years before she became a murder victim. So at the first hearing they calmly plea bargained and managed to get six months’ imprisonment.
The disciplinary proceedings against me were shelved. There too it was in nobody’s interests to go over the whys and wherefores of a case that had ended the way it had. Not even mine. The ruling, which was quite brief, said that I had not committed any disciplinary offence, but had simply “interpreted with vigour, but within the limits of ethical correctness, the mandate of counsel for the plaintiff”.
Alessandra Mantovani has stayed in Palermo. When the assignment was nearly over, she asked for, and obtained, a permanent transfer. Now she works in the anti-Mafia department and every now and again I read her name, and see her photograph – her face looking tired and hardened – in some newspaper. It always gives me a curious twinge of sadness. Like the one I felt when she told me she was leaving.
Claudia, on the other hand, has stayed in Bari. She still runs the refuge but has stopped calling herself Sister. Not that she ever held a press conference or put up posters to tell everyone she wasn’t a nun.
Whenever a new girl arrives in the community, she simply introduces herself with her name and that’s it. If anyone who knew her before calls her “Sister”, she tells them just her name will be fine. In other words, Claudia.
Which isn’t the name she has on her papers, but that doesn’t really matter. Her real name is Claudia. The name on her papers was given to her by her natural parents. If you can apply the word natural to a father who does things like that to his little girl and a mother who lets him do it, pretending she doesn’t see or hear a thing.
Her real mother, her only family, had been Sister Caterina, in the reformatory.
35
When I told Margherita that I’d like to take up parachuting, she looked at me for a long time without saying anything. “Was I trying to show her I could still surprise her?” she asked when she got the power of speech back. If so, I’d succeeded.
A few days later I started the course.
During those weeks I felt a very strange sensation I’d never known before, a mixture of definite fear and unsettling serenity. A sense of the inevitable and a mysterious dignity.
The night before the jump, I didn’t sleep a wink. Obviously.
But I stayed in bed all night, wide awake, thinking about many things, remembering many things. The most vivid of all was that terrible children’s game on the ledge, so many years ago.
Every now and again a wave of absolutely pure fear swept over me. I let it flow through my body, like a current of energy, until it had passed. Sometimes these waves were stronger, and lasted for a longer time. Sometimes I thought I was going to die the next day. Sometimes I thought I’d pull out at the last moment. But that too passed.
If Margherita noticed I hadn’t slept, she didn’t say anything in the morning.
Strangely, I didn’t feel tired. On the contrary, my arms and legs felt loose and my mind clear and clean. I wasn’t thinking about anything.
The deafening noise of the plane dropped until it became a kind of background rumble. Powerful but contained, in the half-light of the cockpit. The pilot had reduced speed to the minimum and it almost seemed as if the plane was suspended between the earth and the sky.
There were six of us due to jump. I and three others would go first. Then the instructor and Margherita, who had asked to be there and had told me about it only that morning.
When the hatch was thrown wide open the wind rushed in, and the light was unsettling.
I was very close to the mystery of life and death.
The instructor told me to place myself across the opening, as I had been taught. I did as I was told. A few seconds passed and he signalled to me to jump. I looked down and didn’t move. It was like an endless scene in slow motion, developed frame by frame. I stood there motionless. He repeated that I should jump, but I didn’t move. Everything was absurdly still.
Then Margherita came up to me, squeezed my arm and said something in my ear. I couldn’t make out the words over the noise of the plane, but there was no need.
So I closed my eyes and let go.
A few seconds, or a few centuries, later I heard the phutt of the parachute opening. And the incredible silence of the empty sky, with the plane already a long way away.
My eyes were still closed when I became aware of a strange yet familiar noise. It took me a while to realize it was my own breath, emerging from deep inside the silence, the fall, the fear.
I still had my eyes closed when I heard my name being called. It was only then that I opened them, and saw where I was. I saw the world below me, and realized I was flying without fear. And I saw Margherita, a hundred, a hundred and thirty feet above me, waving to me.
I felt an emotion that can’t be explained, and I raised my hand too.
I raised both hands, waving like I used to when I was a little child and I was very happy.
REASONABLE DOUBTS
Gianrico Carofiglio
Counsel for the defence Guido Guerrieri is asked to handle the appeal of Fabio Paolicelli, who has been sentenced to sixteen years for drug smuggling. The odds are stacked against the accused: not only the fact that he initially confessed to the crime, but also his past as a neo-Fascist thug. It is only the intervention of Paolicelli’s beautiful half-Japanese wife that finally overcomes Guerrieri’s reluctance.
Reasonable Doubts, Carofiglio’s third novel featuring Guerrieri, follows on from the critical and commercial success of Involuntary Witness and A Walk in the Dark.
PRAISE FOR REASONABLE DOUBTS
“The role of lawyer Guido Guerrieri is to take on impossible cases that have little chance of su
ccess. The lawyer accepts this case only because he’s fallen in lust with the prisoner’s wife; his efforts to prove his client’s innocence bring him into dangerous conflict with Mafia interests.
Everything a legal thriller should be.” The Times
This novel is hard-boiled and sun-dried in equal parts. Guerrieri stumbles into a case involving old enmities, a femme fatale and a murky conspiracy. But where Philip Marlowe would be knocking back bourbon and listening to the snap of fist on jaw, Guerrieri prefers Sicilian wine and Leonard Cohen… The local colour is complemented by snappy legal procedural writing which sends the reader tumbling through the clockwork of a tightly wound plot.” The Financial Times
“Carofiglio, until recently an anti-Mafia prosecutor in southern Italy, is particularly well placed to write legal thrillers, and he does so with considerable brio, humour and skill.” The Daily Mail
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INVOLUNTARY WITNESS
Gianrico Carofiglio
A nine-year-old boy is found murdered at the bottom of a well near a popular beach resort in southern Italy. In what looks like a hopeless case for Guido Guerrieri, counsel for the defence, a Senegalese peddler is accused of the crime. Faced with small-town racism fuelled by the recent immigration from Africa, Guido attempts to exploit the esoteric workings of the Italian courts.
A Walk in the Dark Page 17