I’m not sure why I decided to lie. Maybe a vague sense of caution, maybe irritation at the overbearing and slightly hysterical tone of his questions. I told him that I’d read the documents and then given them back.
As we walked along Via Calefati we met a colleague of mine, Carbone, who specializes in defending burglars and fences, and is also a notorious frequenter of the East European prostitutes on the southern seafront. I say notorious because he made no mystery of his predilection – the main reason being that they were such excellent value for money – and also because he had once been caught in one of the periodic police raids. The officers hadn’t been discreet and, the morning after, the fact that Carbone had been taken to police headquarters in the company of whores, pimps and crooks of every kind had been the main subject of conversation at the courthouse. I would have died of shame, but he paraded around the place like a star, pleased with the sidelong glances that were thrown at him.
He greeted Larocca obsequiously and threw me a questioning glance that I ignored.
“Let’s go into the first decent place we find,” Larocca said. “It unnerves me, talking like this while we’re walking.”
A couple of blocks further on, there was an old café, the Cristal, which had been there for as long as I could remember. When I used to go there as a little boy, there were five flavours of ice cream – hazelnut, coffee, chocolate, strawberry and pistachio – and there was lemon and coffee granita, with whipped cream, of course. It had tables at the back where nobody ever sat apart from a couple of very old ladies (the barman had once said that they’d both been born in 1900) whose presence could be sensed from a distance because of the very strong smell of mothballs mixed with eau de cologne and the stink of cigarettes. They would have coffee granita with double whipped cream, and they would smoke and peddle malicious gossip about everyone. They both died well into their nineties, cigarette addicts to the end, having avoided the indignity of the smoking ban being introduced in public places.
If those two were there, it was impossible to get to the table area without gas masks and bulletproof vests. If they weren’t there, the barman – a very thin man, with a face devoid of expression, but capable of rare, unexpected and scathing one-liners – let us park ourselves there all afternoon, even though we consumed almost nothing. There were three of us, three friends, fifteen years old, and spending time at a café table, immersed in interminable discussions – the subjects ranged from sport to girls, from politics to books – made us feel like men.
It struck me that I hadn’t been in that place for at least ten years and that I hadn’t sat at those tables – assuming they were still there – for more than thirty.
“Let’s go in here.”
At the counter there was a young man with a gaunt face, maybe the grandson of the barman who’d let us camp out there all those years ago. The tables were still in their places, the same as before, three-legged Formica tables of different colours – what remained of the different colours. And just as before, there was nobody there. Apart, maybe, from the ghosts of the two old ladies.
Larocca looked around somewhat uncomfortably.
“Nobody will disturb us here,” I reassured him.
Over a coffee and a Prosecco I gave him a summary of the situation. He let me speak without interrupting or asking any questions. His facial expression wavered between incredulity, dismay and anger.
When I finished – I’d tried to be as concise and neutral as possible – he rubbed his forehead with his hand. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I was working, going out, sleeping, and those bastards were investigating me. They were bugging my phones, checking my phone records, my bank accounts, my assets. It’s unheard of. Unheard of.”
I was about to reply that actually they were only doing their job and that it would be best not to take it too personally. Then I told myself that Larocca wasn’t in a state of mind to consider the matter objectively.
“They asked to arrest me. They wanted to arrest me, and if the file had ended up in the hands of a judge less scrupulous than that woman, they’d have succeeded. It’s astonishing they haven’t searched my home or office, quite astonishing.”
“Maybe they would have done it when they arrested you. I don’t want to give you any further reasons to worry, but it could still happen, maybe a few days before you’re notified of the appeal hearing. Or maybe at the same time.”
He shook his head, dejected, angry and powerless. Then he looked at me and noticed the plasters on my temple. “What happened to you?”
“Oh, nothing, a little scratch at the gym.”
“In our university days you used to box.”
“I still do, a little.”
“Good for you, you’re in great shape. I should do something too, I’m too sedentary, just sit writing rulings.”
The waiter came and asked us if we wanted anything else, and I told him no before Pierluigi could order another Prosecco.
“What do we do, Guido?”
“We go to the appeal hearing when we know the date, and we argue the case. I wouldn’t be too pessimistic about it. The judge’s rejection was well argued, and in my opinion doesn’t leave much room for discussion. We’ll see what the prosecutor writes, but if I’d been him I wouldn’t even have contested it.”
“What would you have done?”
“I’d have tried to make further inquiries, and if the outcome was positive, I’d have presented a new petition to the examining magistrate. But with the situation as it is, the appeal will almost certainly be rejected and the Prosecutor’s Department will have had two unfavourable decisions in a row. Not exactly the best conditions for going ahead with such a delicate case.”
“Almost certainly.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said the appeal will almost certainly be rejected. So you think it may also be accepted?”
When someone in the profession – a judge, a policeman or a lawyer – ends up entangled in the legal process, he loses, as if by magic, the ability to look at things lucidly. Like a doctor who falls seriously ill. His intelligence and his technical competence are completely obscured by anxiety and a paranoid vision of events and people. If this case had been about someone else and that other person had asked him for his opinion on the possible outcome of the appeal, Larocca would have smiled somewhat contemptuously and said that there was no way the court would overturn the examining magistrate’s ruling. But now he was asking me with a worried look on his face to tell him what I meant by the expression almost certainly – a “get-out clause”, as they say.
“No, I really don’t think so. And even in the very unlikely event that this happens, the decision, as you know much better than me, is suspended until the Supreme Court can give its verdict. But in all honesty I wouldn’t worry about it. The more general question concerns the strategy we adopt, always bearing in mind that we don’t want the news to leak out.”
“You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that. If they don’t succeed in arresting me, they’ll try to bad-mouth me in the press. I can already imagine the headlines: Former Mafioso accuses the head of the appeal court of corruption, Umpteenth scandal at the Palace of Justice, or—”
“I’m sorry, Pierluigi, but this isn’t the right way. It’s very unpleasant, I won’t deny that, but the most effective way of confronting the matter is to avoid emotionalism. Let’s try to be cool and practical, if we possibly can.”
He sighed, clenched his jaws – it was likely he didn’t appreciate my paternalistic exhortations to keep calm, and come to think of it I wouldn’t have appreciated them in his place either – then lowered his gaze and let about ten seconds go by. “All right, let’s try to be practical. What do we do?”
“The first decision to make is this: do we wait for the notification of the appeal hearing or until they institute something like a search, or do we reconsider the possibility of presenting a petition based on article 335, with a request for you to be examined? The scenari
o has changed a bit since we first talked about it, and there may not be the disadvantages that we considered back then.”
“What would you choose?”
I took a few seconds to think, even though there was really no choice. The only thing that made any sense at that moment was to wait for the Prosecutor’s Department to make its next move.
“I’d wait. I realize it’s a little more nerve-wracking to remain in suspense, waiting for other people to make a move, but right now it’ll only be a matter of a few days before they notify us of the date of the appeal hearing. Then we’ll know formally about the proceedings, and we’ll be able to consult the papers, make copies, ask to be questioned, all without any particular urgency. Then we’ll go to court and challenge the appeal, which in all probability will be rejected—”
“And what if it gets into the newspapers?”
“If it gets into the newspapers, we could emphasize that the original petition for a custody order was rejected for lack of evidence. But we’ll decide that if and when the time comes.”
He nodded. He seemed calmer. “So we wait?”
“We wait, yes. But while we’re about it, I’d like to ask you a few questions, just to get a better idea of the overall picture, to understand why it all happened in the first place, why on earth Capodacqua made those statements.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Capodacqua made those statements. That’s a given, and we can’t argue about it. He may have made it all up. He may have said those things thinking they were true. Because Ladisa told him a pack of lies, to boast or for some other reason I can’t quite figure out. Or because Salvagno was influence peddling. To work out a line of defence, we need to try and figure out which of these hypotheses is the right one. The judge thinks it was influence peddling, and in my opinion that’s the likeliest hypothesis.”
He seemed uncertain, and said nothing. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, passed his hand across his forehead again and pinched one of his cheeks. I realized that these rather obsessive gestures were making me feel uncomfortable and I resumed speaking.
“Maybe you could tell me something about your relationship with Salvagno. I only knew him a little. Was he really your friend? Did you see each other often?”
“Friend is an overstatement. We played tennis sometimes, and sometimes I was a guest on his boat.”
“Did you meet regularly?”
“A couple of times a month, no more.”
“Lunches, dinners together?”
“Every now and again, and always with other people.”
“Obviously he appeared before you in court.”
“Of course. He dealt a lot with organized crime, he often had clients who were in prison.”
“Please don’t be annoyed by my next question. Did you ever think of abstaining in cases where he was counsel for the defence?”
“No. There were no grounds to do so, which you know as well as I do. I saw Corrado Salvagno occasionally, but no more than I did other lawyers. If I had to abstain in all cases defended by someone I’ve played tennis or been to dinner with, I might as well quit this job. Same for many colleagues. Anyway, Corrado Salvagno was an excellent lawyer and an honest person. He never asked me for anything. He appeared before me and always argued his cases well. When he was right we agreed with him. When he was wrong we rejected his appeals. Just like with anyone else. Just like with you, for example.”
Actually, things weren’t quite the way he said. It wasn’t at all clear, for example, that there had never been any grounds for abstention. According to the code, a judge is obliged to abstain in a number of different circumstances: in particular, if there are serious conflicts of interest. One of these serious conflicts of interest is when the judge is a friend of a lawyer and sees him regularly outside the courtroom. Larocca had just told me that he didn’t see Salvagno more than occasionally, but I had the impression that things weren’t so cut and dried. It was a subject we would do well to go into in more depth before the Prosecutor’s Department brought it up.
“Listen, Pierluigi, I’d like one thing to be clear. I’m your lawyer until you decide to brief someone else. To do my job, which is in your interest, I need to ask you questions and to acquire information. So please try not to react so irritably. It doesn’t make the situation any easier.”
Maybe I wanted to add something more, or maybe I’d finished. At that moment the barman with the gaunt face appeared. Larocca ordered another Prosecco. Putting on my health fanatic guise again, I settled for an orange juice. We sat in silence until our drinks arrived. I tried to remember what there had been on the walls, now bare, when I used to come here as a boy. Posters? Stiff boards propped on the floor? A mirror with advertisements for Campari, Martini or Peroni?
He drank half a glass in one gulp. I sipped at my juice. Somewhere, a defective machine was buzzing.
“I’m sorry, Guido, you’re right. You’re only doing your job. It’s just that this business is eating me up inside. I can’t believe it’s happening to me. It’s a nightmare.”
He rubbed his forehead again with his hand and finished the Prosecco in another gulp. If he ordered another, I’d tell him it was better not to.
“What else do you want to know?” he said.
“Something about Salvagno. What kind of man was he? Did he talk a lot, or not very much? Was he someone who might have boasted about his friendships, including his friendship with you?”
“He was an honest person. I find it really hard to believe he could have—”
“Do you think Capodacqua made up the things that are in that transcript? Or worse still: that someone suggested to him that he make false statements against you? In other words, that it was a case of slander, which the police and even the prosecutor may have been a party to? Do you think it’s feasible to construct our line of defence on that hypothesis? Personally, I don’t. We have to figure out why he made those statements. I repeat the question: insofar as you knew him, was Salvagno the kind of person who might have boasted, perhaps saying more than he should have done, about your friendship?”
Larocca sighed. “It’s true that sometimes he talked too much. He had a tendency to… as you say, to boast: about his boat, his villa, his women, his professional successes. And now that I come to think about it, yes, he had a tendency to talk a little too much about the people he knew. Prefects, members of parliament, judges, actors.” He paused for some time, as if trying to retrieve a piece of information that was re-emerging from a shadowy area of his memory. “But to go from that to imagining that he—”
“Do you know if he had financial problems?”
“He was always complaining about his expenses. That he needed a lot of money to maintain the boat, the houses, the ex-wife, the girlfriends. But I always thought he was just saying that. It was another way of boasting, part of his character. I never knew if he really did have problems with money.”
“Because if he was struggling financially, the hypothesis that he peddled influence in order to get his clients to pay him more, on the pretext that he had to pay you or other judges, might make sense. It wouldn’t be the first time. We’ll have to run some checks on his finances.”
“All right. What I find incredible is the idea that Corrado could have implicated me in something like that. But you’re right, we have to figure out what happened and why this Capodacqua said those things.”
“What about his fatal accident? I remember reading about it in the newspapers, but I don’t know any of the details.”
“A German lorry driver dozed off at the wheel, and skidded into the other lane. That’s all. Pure chance.”
“Was he travelling alone?”
“Yes, he was on his way back from Rome. He’d gone there for a hearing at the Supreme Court.”
“Was the lorry driver hurt?”
“Not seriously, as far as I remember.”
“Were there any suspicions about what happened?”
“What do yo
u mean?”
“Did anybody suggest any kind of criminal intent? In other words: were things the way they seemed?”
He looked at me in surprise. “Do you seriously think someone might have…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. The idea must have struck him as much too far-fetched.
“I have no reason to suppose so. But trying to find out what happened to Salvagno, who may have talked a bit too much – maybe even to the wrong people – could be useful to us. I think it’s something else it might be worth investigating.”
I told myself that I was ready to go into politics, since I’d just come up with a perfect non-answer. Larocca seemed to be on the verge of replying. Then he dropped it, as if he’d said to himself, in some kind of inner dialogue, that it really was too absurd to contemplate.
“Another couple of questions, and then we can go. The question of the wine: is it true that Salvagno sent you bottles of wine?”
For a moment, an almost imperceptible grimace of impatience appeared on his face, but he suppressed it. “Sometimes. He had a client who produced a respectable Primitivo. He sometimes gave me a few bottles.”
I couldn’t have looked too convinced.
“We’re talking about ten-euro bottles,” Larocca said, unable to avoid a defensive tone.
How on earth had Capodacqua known about that? Or in other words, how had Ladisa known about it, in order to be able to tell Capodacqua? Whether or not there was any mystery behind his death, Salvagno had clearly been someone who talked too much. It was likely that his death really had been an accident and that there was no reason to let my imagination run away with me.
But.
But I would ask Annapaola to include the accident on the list of things to be checked out. If only to get it off my mind.
Soon afterwards, we left the café and stopped on the street to say goodbye.
“Careful with your phones, Pierluigi.”
“Do you think they might be tapping them again? Or that they never stopped?”
“The first is more likely. In all probability they stopped tapping your phones when they petitioned for the custody order. They might start again closer to the notification of the appeal, to record any possible reactions to the news that proceedings do indeed exist. Assuming that the examining magistrate agrees to it, which is by no means certain. Given that we don’t know for sure, don’t say anything on the phone that might lend itself to being misinterpreted. In other words, say as little as possible. As soon as you get any kind of notification, call me and tell me what happened and ask to meet without making any comments and without any reference to these conversations of ours. Sorry to be pedantic, but is that quite clear?”
A Fine Line Page 11