Temporary Perfections

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  “I thought I’d talk with Manuela’s ex-boyfriend, her two friends in Rome, and maybe the girl who drove her to the station the day she disappeared.”

  I told him I’d need some help getting in touch with these people. He said, sure, he’d take care of it. He would call Manuela’s mother right away—the father, as I’d seen, was in no shape to help us—and ask her to get in touch with those young people. He’d let me know right away what the story was. He knew he’d done the right thing when he contacted me, he said at the end, with an incongruous note of cheerfulness in his voice. Then he plunged back into the murky space he’d occupied before answering the phone.

  I thought maybe now I could get to work.

  Lawyer work, that is. I was through playing at being an investigator for now. The next day I would be in court for one of the most surreal trials of my so-called career. I called Consuelo, who’d been studying the file for me, and told her to come into my office to bring me up to speed.

  12.

  My client was twenty-five, and he was charged with mass murder.

  Put in those terms, the act sounds pretty impressive. It summons up tragic images, the bitter odor of gunpowder, ravaged corpses, screams, blood, shattered limbs, and ambulances with wailing sirens rushing to the scene.

  But if you read the official charges and the file from the initial investigation, things looked different. The charges stated that Nicola Costantino was accused of the crime described in and punished under Article 422, Paragraph Two of the penal code because, with the intent of killing himself, he also committed acts liable to endanger the public safety, specifically opening the gas line in his home with the intent of filling the air with gas and causing an explosion with the potential to destroy the entire apartment building. Only the intervention of the Carabinieri stopped this wholesale destruction from taking place.

  Nicola Costantino, long under medical care for psychiatric issues, tried to commit suicide by gas. He was alone in the apartment. He locked himself in the kitchen, drank half a bottle of rum, and downed a powerful dose of tranquilizers, and then he turned on the gas without lighting the burners. A neighbor with a sensitive nose almost immediately smelled that something wasn’t right and called the Carabinieri. The paramilitary police—“promptly arriving at the site,” as the report noted—knocked down the front door and threw open the windows. They found the young man unconscious on the floor but, miraculously, still in and of this world. In other words, they saved his life. But, after checking with the magistrate on duty at the time, they also arrested him. On charges of mass murder.

  If you consult a handbook of Italian criminal law, you will find that no one need die in order for charges of the crime of mass murder to be brought. There just needs to have been a clear and present danger, provided that the act or acts in question were carried out specifically to kill.

  The classic case studied in the classroom is one in which a terrorist places a highly explosive device in a public place. The bomb fails to go off, let’s say because the police bomb squad intervenes, or because it malfunctions, but the terrorist can still be tried for mass murder because it was his intention to kill an indeterminate number of people, and his actions were designed to bring about that result.

  My client’s story was—how can I put this?—slightly different. Nicola Costantino was no terrorist; he was just a scrawny young man, mentally disturbed and irremediably prone to failure. He had decided to kill himself, and he’d failed at that, too. This proved mostly that his ineptitude extended to the field of self-destructive behavior.

  There is no doubt that by doing something as stupid as turning on the gas, he had endangered everyone else in his apartment building; there is likewise no doubt that his idiotic actions were not a reflection of his intent to kill anyone except himself.

  This was the very basic argument I had tried to make to the prosecuting attorney and the special arraignment court in an attempt to persuade them that the crime of mass murder wasn’t justified in this case, and that there was therefore no legal basis for holding my client in prison.

  I hadn’t persuaded them. In rejecting the appeal, the judges wrote that “all that is required to justify a charge of mass murder is that someone should have had the intention of killing anyone, which would, of course, include the intention of killing only himself.”

  That argument was powerfully paradoxical.

  Hadn’t Costantino in fact threatened the public safety with his attempt—unsuccessful only because of the timely intervention of the authorities—to kill himself? If so, then he was clearly guilty of the crime of mass murder, which in his case rose to the required threshold with respect to all factors, both objective and subjective.

  And since the nature of the defendant’s acts and his evidently unstable personality (this was the one point on which I tended to agree with the judges) could reasonably suggest the likelihood of a recidivistic repetition of the same kind of behavior—in other words, he was liable to do it again—the court was bound to confirm the order of preventive detention, in its most trenchant form: prison.

  I was preparing my Court of Cassation appeal of this half-baked interpretation of Italian criminal law when my clients’ parents came to see me. They seemed slightly embarrassed, but after some initial hesitation, they managed to convey, with much hemming and hawing, that they didn’t want me to appeal the court’s verdict.

  “Why not?” I asked, nonplussed.

  The man and woman looked at one another, as if trying to decide which of the two should answer.

  “If it’s a matter of my fee,” I said, trying to remember how much I’d told them the appeal would cost, “don’t worry about it, you can pay me when you have the money.”

  The father answered.

  “No, thank you, counselor. It’s not about the money. It’s just that Nicola seems to be doing so much better in prison. Both the guards and the other inmates treat him well. He’s socializing. He’s made friends, and when we go to visit him, he seems almost happy. Honestly, we haven’t seen him in such good spirits in years.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard them right. The father shrugged.

  “Let’s leave him in jail for a few more months,” added the mother, with an expression that seemed to blend a sense of guilt with a sense of relief, and even a touch of cheerfulness.

  “When they finally bring him to trial, we’re sure you’ll manage to win an acquittal. They’ll release him from prison, and we can help him rebuild his life. But for now, maybe we should leave him in jail for a while, since he seems to be doing so well. It’s as if he were in a treatment facility,” the father concluded, with the relieved expression of someone who has just completed a challenging task.

  I was about to say that Nicola was legally an adult and therefore, for reasons of professional ethics, I would have to ask how he felt about this novel solution.

  Instead, I thought it over for a few seconds and, in a decision I would prefer the ethics committee of the bar association not know about, said nothing. I only held out both hands, palms up, in a gesture of surrender to the inevitable.

  Now, months later, it was time for the preliminary hearing.

  That morning, prior to my hearing, there was a social security fraud trial with dozens of defendants. The hall—the largest hearing room in the building—was teeming with defendants and their lawyers, and it had all the dignified sobriety of the Marrakech souk. There was every reason to suppose that this would take some time. Since I didn’t know how else to pass the time, I pulled my iPod out of my briefcase and set it on shuffle.

  Suddenly, as if by magic, the scene was transformed into a spectacle of deranged, mythical, senseless beauty.

  Unbeknownst to them, lawyers, defendants, the judge, court clerks, and police officers were all dancing to the syncopated rhythm of rock ‘n’ roll, in an extravaganza staged just for me.

  Lawyers standing up and declaiming, saying things I couldn’t hear, defendants conferring amongst themselves, the
judge dictating a statement: a sort of collective movement that, thanks to the music, seemed to take on meaning and necessity.

  The best part of my private musical came when a colleague of mine whose most distinctive professional quality has always been his implacable scorn for the proper use of the subjunctive, stood up and addressed the judge, gesticulating vigorously, in perfect time—at least, that’s how it appeared to me—to the voice of Freddie Mercury singing “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

  Sometimes being a lawyer isn’t bad at all, I thought, as I settled back, stretched out my legs under the bench in front of me, and enjoyed the show.

  After the initial hearing in the social security fraud trial, the courtroom emptied out and I put away my earbuds. It was our turn. The only people left in the room were the judge, the court clerk, me, Consuelo—who had arrived after making the rounds of the various clerks’ offices—the prosecuting attorney, my client, and the two prison guards who had brought him to court and who continued to keep a close eye on him. You never knew—he might take it into his head to turn on the gas and murder an entire courtroom full of people.

  After briskly dispensing with the initial formalities, the judge asked if there were any requests. I stood up and said that Signore Costantino wished to be questioned. The defendant had only been questioned once, when he was arraigned, two days after his arrest, I reasoned. At that time he hadn’t been perfectly lucid, to put it mildly.

  The judge dictated a brief order for the stenographer to enter into the record, and then ordered the two prison guards to bring the defendant before him. Then, he asked the prosecutor to begin.

  “Have you read the charges in the indictment?” the prosecutor asked Nicola. Nicola looked at him in bewilderment, as if he couldn’t understand the purpose of such an idiotic question. Then he saw me nod my head and got that he was expected to answer.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Did you do the things that are written in the formal charges?”

  “I turned on the gas because I wanted to end it all. But I certainly didn’t want to kill people. Later, when I got my head on straight, I realized I could have caused a disaster.”

  “Do you mean to say that you realized you had put into effect a chain of events capable of threatening public safety?”

  I was about to object, but I thought better of it. An objection would be pointless, since the question was pointless. My client, who was not, as I have mentioned, the sharpest tool in the shed, sounded fairly reasonable as he responded. The prosecutor asked a few more questions, then said he was finished.

  “Would you care to proceed, Counselor Guerrieri?” the judge asked.

  “Thank you, your honor. I have very few questions to ask because, as you know perfectly well, the key to this trial has more to do with the law than the facts.” I paused, and I thought I detected an almost imperceptible nod of approval from the judge. This isn’t always a good thing, but the judge that day was well-informed and also intelligent, so that slight tilt of his head struck me as a promising sign.

  “Signore Costantino, it is a well-established fact that you turned on the gas and that it was your intention to commit suicide. We need not cover that ground again. But I’d like to ask you something else: When you turned on the gas, was it your intention to kill anyone else?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “At the moment when you turned on the gas, did it occur to you, did you imagine that your action might result in the death of other people besides yourself?”

  “No, no, I just wanted to go to sleep and end it all. I told you I was out of my mind. I was on medication.”

  “Do you mean that you were taking pharmaceuticals?”

  “Yes, antidepressants.”

  “You said that it was only afterward that you realized the consequences your actions might have had. Is that right?”

  “Yes, many days later, when I was beginning to recover. In prison.”

  “Thank you. I have no further questions.”

  “Very good. If there are no further questions, I would say that we can proceed to summation,” said the judge.

  The prosecutor stood up and once again ran through his innovative interpretation of the definition of mass murder. The crime required the intention of killing, without any specific indication of who might be the victim of that intention. Costantino, when he opened the gas, intended to kill himself and implicitly accepted the risk of killing other people. This was sufficient basis for trying and convicting him. For mass murder.

  Then it was my turn.

  “Please indulge me, Your Honor, if I go on a little longer than is usually allowed in a preliminary hearing for the ritual, and often pointless, request for an acquittal. Because this is certainly one of those cases with potential for acquittal, even at this early juncture, without wading through the lengthy process of a full criminal trial. To tell the truth, the idea of hauling a defendant before a criminal court for a gas leak, albeit an intentional one, is paradoxical, if not verging on the outright grotesque.”

  The judge picked up a pen and wrote something. I made a mental note, thinking that it might be a good sign, though judges are unpredictable creatures. I continued.

  “There is no question that this trial should be resolved on the point of law, the interpretation of criminal law, given that the facts are unquestioned. Indeed, an unhappy young man struggling with depression attempts suicide. The Carabinieri heroically intervene, rescue the young man, and avert a potential tragedy. The question that this trial must answer is the following: Did the behavior of this young man involve all the elements of the crime of mass murder? A crime, let us remember, that is punishable by imprisonment for a term of no fewer than fifteen years.”

  I spoke for about ten minutes in all. I did my best to convey a fairly straightforward concept: The crime of mass murder can be said to have taken place—even if no one dies—only in a case in which the defendant acted with the intent of killing an unspecified number of people, because it is a crime against public safety. To put it simply, if someone tries to kill himself, he’s not trying to commit mass murder. And so if no one dies, quite simply, no crime has been committed.

  I found that I was having a hard time explaining something so self-evident. Perhaps it was too self-evident to be argued effectively. When I was done, I was dissatisfied with my efforts, and I was convinced that the judge was about to order my client to stand trial.

  Instead, the judge rapidly wrote something down, stood up, and read aloud: There were no grounds for subjecting Nicola Costantino to a criminal trial because the acts of which he was accused did not constitute a crime. The defendant should therefore be released immediately, unless he was in custody for any other cause.

  That was the sudden and abrupt end of the hearing, and the judge had already vanished into chambers when I walked over to the young man to inform him that he had been acquitted and that, in a few hours—the time required to process his release from prison—he would be a free man.

  “Congratulations. I was sure that they’d order him to stand trial, to avoid the responsibility of making the decision themselves and save themselves the trouble of having to write the opinion,” said Consuelo as we left the courtroom.

  “Yeah, I didn’t have high hopes for an acquittal either.”

  “And now?”

  “What do you mean, and now?”

  “Will his parents be happier that Nicola has been acquitted, or more concerned about what might happen now that he’s coming home?”

  That was exactly what I was wondering just then. And of course, I had no answer to the question.

  13.

  I had said good-bye to Consuelo and was just stepping into a wine bar to get a bite to eat when Fornelli called. He said that he had spoken with Manuela’s mother, and that she in turn had called the two girlfriends and the ex-boyfriend. Through other friends of her daughter, she had also contacted Anita Salvemini, the young woman who had given Manuela a ride to the Ostuni trai
n station. She’d explained to all of them that we were making an effort to find out what had happened to her daughter, and she asked them if they’d agree to talk to me. They’d all said yes, except for Abbrescia.

  “Why not Abbrescia?”

  I heard a brief hesitation at the other end of the line.

  “She told Manuela’s mother that she was in Rome. She said for the next few weeks she’s very busy with classes and exams and she’s not sure when she’ll be back in Bari.”

  There was another hesitation, and then Fornelli went on.

  “To tell you the truth, Signora Ferraro thought the girl seemed uncomfortable. That she wasn’t particularly happy about the phone call, and even less interested in the idea of talking to you. Talking to a lawyer, in other words.”

  “Can you get her phone number?”

  “Sure. Anyway, all the others said they would be willing to come talk to you in your office. Even today, if you have time.”

  I told him to hold on for a second, took a quick look at the appointment book I carried in my briefcase, and saw that I had only a couple of meetings scheduled in the early part of the afternoon.

  “Okay. There are three of them, so let’s ask them to come in one after the other, an hour apart. Let’s say at six, seven, and eight o’clock. That way I’ll have all the time I need to talk with each of them. Could you call them and schedule the meetings?”

  “Of course, I’ll take care of it. Unless you hear back from me within an hour or so, assume it’s all confirmed.”

  The first one to show up, a few minutes past six, was Anita Salvemini.

  She was a short, stocky young woman, dressed in cargo pants and a brown leather jacket. She had a face that was chubby but determined; when we shook hands, she had the grip of a man. All told, she struck me as trustworthy.