“Yes, quite clear.”
13
We didn’t have long to wait. The following Tuesday, at seven in the morning, I was woken by a telephone call from Larocca. His voice was cracked and even a little breathless, as if he’d just been running or making some other physical effort.
“There are men from the customs police in my home, with a search warrant from the Prosecutor’s Department in Lecce. I told them I want my lawyer to be present. Do you think you could come?”
“Give me a quarter of an hour and I’ll be there.”
To hurry things up I took my bicycle, and about a quarter of an hour later I was at Larocca’s home, at the end of Via Dalmazia, in the Madonnella area, not far from the RAI offices. An ambiguous part of the city, between early twentieth-century apartment buildings with spectacular views over the blue and green of the Adriatic and the streets of Rione Japigia, which had been – and maybe still were, despite the many arrests, trials and sentences – the uncontested kingdom of powerful criminal gangs. Ruthless bosses with nicknames, lookouts posted at the borders of the neighbourhood to give the alarm when the police arrived, rivers of drugs of every kind sold wholesale to buyers from all over the region, or exchanged for other illegal goods – arms, stolen cars, sometimes even human beings. A lot of money had changed hands in that area. In quantities it’s hard to imagine, if you have a normal job. When many of those people had ended up in prison, very little of the money had been found. It had been channelled into activities that were beyond suspicion, or had disappeared into the pockets of greedy advisers abroad, transported God knows how, intended for God knows whom.
I seemed to remember that even as a boy Larocca had lived around there. What did his father do? I wasn’t sure I’d ever known. I wondered if the anonymous Seventies condominium I was entering now was the same one he’d grown up in.
There were no names next to the entryphone. I rang number four, as I had been told to do, and went up to the second floor. There wasn’t any nameplate on the door either, but he was in the doorway waiting for me. His hair, usually well combed, was falling over his forehead and curled a little pathetically at the sides of his head. He hadn’t shaved – when would he have had a chance to do so? – and, as happens in such cases to men who don’t have much of a beard, he looked like a mixture of the scruffy and the forlorn.
“Thanks for coming, Guido. This business is driving me mad. It’s a good thing I don’t have to be in court today.”
I couldn’t find any appropriate words of comfort, so I limited myself to a slight smile and a gentle pat on the shoulder.
“Where are they?”
“There, in the living room.”
As I walked into the apartment I felt a slight but immediate sense of anxiety. There was an artificial smell, of detergent, of synthetic lemon. Everything was perfectly tidy. In the entrance there was a series of framed lithographs. All of the same size, with the same frames, perfectly equidistant one from the other. The living room was divided in two. On one side, a sofa, two armchairs, a large TV set and a stereo; on the other, a bookcase, with a couple of encyclopaedias and rows of books arranged strictly by order of height, an Eighties walnut table and a large abstract painting hanging exactly in the middle of the wall. It gave the impression that it had been done to commission, specifically to decorate that particular stretch of wall.
There were three officers from the customs police: a lieutenant-colonel and two marshals in jackets and ties, with well-cut clothes that showed no bulges where they carried their guns. They were modern policemen, looking more like managers or bank officials. They greeted me politely, almost cordially, as if trying to apologize for causing so much bother.
One of the marshals was sitting at the table in the living room, in front of a laptop computer to which he had connected a small printer. The complete text of the record appeared on the screen. The lieutenant-colonel, a tall, slightly overweight man in his forties with a noticeably receding hairline and intelligent eyes, asked me if I wanted to read the search warrant. As I skimmed through it – there was nothing in the stated grounds that I didn’t already know – he noticed my plasters, which were still there and quite visible.
“What happened to you, Avvocato? A dissatisfied client?”
“Unfortunately I got into a fight with some hooligans in the street.”
He gave a little smile. That morning he had an unpleasant chore to dispatch, but at least he’d ended up with a pleasant lawyer. “I think we can start,” he said, dismissing the subject of my plasters.
I replied that it was fine by me. Larocca did the same, but he seemed like someone who has taken an overdose of prescription drugs. His voice was shaky, his eyes were glassy, even his posture had something bedraggled about it. That can happen, when someone comes into your home and claims the right to rummage among your things.
I asked myself for a moment how I would behave in the same situation. I couldn’t find an answer – usually the case when I ask myself that kind of question – and I moved on.
The three officers proceeded calmly and methodically, inspecting every room from top to bottom. A textbook job. Whenever they had to open drawers or cupboards or look behind pictures, they asked permission. Whenever they plunged their hands into piles of clothes and underwear or when they searched the safe in the bedroom, they apologized. They were so nice about everything that I started to get nervous and felt the impulse to tell them to just get on with their work without being so obsequious.
After finishing in each room, we would come back to the living room, where the lieutenant-colonel would dictate the respective part of the record. From time to time he would break off and ask us if we had any objections or clarifications to make. Larocca would shake his head, and I would say no, thanks, there was nothing I wanted to add. Partly because, as was to be expected, the search wasn’t producing any results. They rarely do. Either when the object of a search is something specific, or when the warrant refers in general terms to “objects, documents or anything pertaining to the offence being investigated”, as in this case. There are many reasons for this, including the objective difficulty of actually finding anything in an inhabited house or apartment, where there are enormous quantities of objects and clothes and cubbyholes and hiding places. Carrying out a truly effective search, one that really checks out what there is and what there isn’t in a given place, takes much more time than police officers can devote to it. Sometimes, in searches as in life, you pass by something crucial and don’t notice it. Because you don’t know what to look for, or maybe because what you’re looking for is so obvious, you don’t see it. In searches, as in life, it isn’t a matter of technique, it’s a matter of eyes and time.
I watched the lieutenant-colonel and the other two officers proceed conscientiously – emptying and then refilling the cupboards, beating on the walls in search of possible secret cavities, opening the books and leafing through them in search of hidden papers – and it struck me that, good and professional as they were, the only way they would find anything (assuming there was anything to find) would be through a stroke of luck. So I lost interest in their operations and started looking around to get a better understanding of the apartment and its occupant.
I knew that Larocca had been separated for several years and that he had no children. I couldn’t remember his wife’s face at all.
I opened the windows and looked out onto Via Dalmazia. The RAI sign was just opposite. I came back inside and examined the books – mainly stuff about current affairs and American bestsellers. Larocca joined me while I was browsing among the shelves.
“What do you think, Guido?”
“Professionals, very correct, partly or wholly unconvinced of the point of this search.”
“Why do you think those bastards in the Prosecutor’s Department in Lecce decided to order it?”
“So that nobody can tell them in future that they should have done it and forgot. Plus, they don’t know we were already aware that pr
oceedings were under way. So even though this search is late, it isn’t completely meaningless from an investigative point of view.”
He nodded absently. He would have liked a different answer, but didn’t know what.
“Where are they now?” I asked.
“In the bathroom.”
“Let’s join them. We don’t want them to feel lonely.”
The bathroom was spacious and aseptic. I noticed a white dressing gown hanging on a coat hanger, with the words Plaza Athénée on it. A very expensive hotel in Paris. I had stayed there once, many years ago, when I was still married to Sara, because we’d decided to do something crazy. And when we saw the bill we knew we’d achieved our objective.
I wondered if Larocca had bought that dressing gown, or if he had stuffed it into his suitcase as an unauthorized souvenir of his stay. I took a closer look at the contents of the drawers that the officers were opening, checking and closing again, and realized that the dressing gown wasn’t the only thing that had come from a grand hotel. There were towels from the Mandarin and the Ritz, bottles of shampoo and bath gel from Claridge’s.
Judge Larocca clearly liked luxury and had a slight – slight? – obsession with objects from big hotels. I remembered an uncle of my father’s. Uncle Michele. A really respectable person, a good doctor, someone who would never have jumped his place in a queue – just one example of how strictly he obeyed the rules. He was a Dr Jekyll, and like every Dr Jekyll there were times when he turned into Mr Hyde. Those times were when he stayed in a hotel, either on business or on holiday. Then an uncontrollable predatory impulse would well up in him. Anything that could be taken away without hiring a removal van, he would take. Towels, dressing gowns, ashtrays, bars of soap, shampoo, bath gel, notebooks, pencils, small cartons of jam, snacks, tubs of Nutella and even an entire set of plates, glasses and cups. Whenever my parents talked about it, they referred to it as if it was an illness – a kind of kleptomania, my mother said once, looking at my father with a suspicious expression, as if speculating on the possible genetic nature of the condition.
Well, I thought, Larocca must have a similar problem to Uncle Michele’s.
The officers didn’t pay any attention to it. Why should they? I wondered if I would have noticed if I’d been in their shoes.
The last room to be searched was Pierluigi’s study. They didn’t find anything there either, even though they leafed through law books and codes, opened drawers and lifted the rug on which the desk stood, exactly in the middle. Larocca didn’t keep case files at home – or at least there weren’t any that morning. I wondered how he managed to write his rulings: it struck me as unlikely that he only worked in his office. I told myself that in all probability he used the digital versions of the documents.
The officers made copies of the hard disk from the computer and of a few memory sticks, then said that as far as the apartment was concerned they had finished.
The record was printed and read out loud, with particular emphasis on the statement that no damage had been caused in the course of the operation, and we all signed it in triplicate.
“I’m sorry, Your Honour,” the lieutenant-colonel said, “but we have to go to your office now. It’s included in the prosecutor’s warrant.”
Larocca seemed to have regained his self-control. “Very well, colonel. All I ask is that you… keep this as discreet as possible. We don’t want it to become public knowledge.”
“Don’t worry. If you can make sure that nobody comes in, we’ll get through it in half an hour. As discreetly as we can.”
We decided that I wouldn’t be present at the search of the office. My presence there, along with three strangers, might have generated suspicion and speculation. I would drop by in an hour, as if by chance.
I went to the clerk of the court’s office to check the registers of proceedings or the release of copies, had a burnt coffee, and chatted in a corridor with a female colleague who had been a noted beauty in her youth and who all at once, without warning, declared that she had no objection to extramarital relations. I replied that if I were married I would share her opinion, but she didn’t seem to appreciate the joke.
One way or another, the hour passed, and I went to Larocca’s office.
They hadn’t found anything there either.
“They also gave me these,” Larocca said, handing me a few sheets of paper.
They were a petition for an extension of the period for the preliminary investigation and a petition for a pretrial hearing. In other words, a request to bring the examination of witnesses, which would usually be done during the public trial, forward to the investigative phase.
The prosecutor wanted to proceed with the examination of Capodacqua and Marelli. In the case of the former, who had turned state’s evidence, no specific grounds were required.
In Marelli’s case, the reason cited was that he was not in good health. There was a strong possibility he wouldn’t make it through to the trial, and so needed to be examined as soon as possible. My first reaction was that there wasn’t much point in objecting.
“Was there anything else?”
“No. I think that’s quite enough to be getting on with.”
“No date for the appeal of the custody order?”
He shook his head.
“They’re taking their time,” I said. “Or else the prosecutor has given up on the idea.”
“Why should he?”
“I don’t know. A change of strategy, perhaps. Maybe they think they can acquire more evidence, so there’s no point carrying on with an appeal they probably won’t win.”
“Do you think they’re tapping my phones?”
“It’s quite likely. They do an apparently pointless search just to rock the boat, hoping that the suspect then says something untoward on the phone or calls the wrong person. Or the right person, depending on your point of view.”
“Could they have put bugs here or at home?”
“If the charge is just what’s written here, they can’t do that. You haven’t been caught in the act.”
“I know, dammit, I know. But that’s the problem. I can’t predict their moves, I don’t know how to react. Who would ever have thought I’d be in a situation like this? Shit, dammit, shit. Those bastard sons of bitches, I always knew they’d try to fuck me over one way or another.”
It had been many years since I’d last had occasion to meet Larocca outside our respective professional roles, so it was quite natural that I wasn’t used to hearing him swear like that. From what I remembered from our university days, though, he had never been inclined to use bad language. It made quite an impression on me now, seeing him lose control.
“Okay, let’s think,” I said. “We have a petition for a pretrial hearing, which means they must have filed the supporting documents. I’ll go to Lecce tomorrow, look at the case file and ask for a copy. Then we’ll decide what to do.”
“All right.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll take these for now. I’ll scan them in my office, then give them back to you.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you can keep them. I feel disgusted just looking at them.”
14
That evening I went out with my friend Nadia. She’d called me a few days earlier. “I have two tickets for a concert at the Petruzzelli. I’ll buy you dinner after it.”
As the lights dimmed, I recalled that whenever my father had taken me to concerts as a child that had always been my favourite moment: the moment when the auditorium slipped into semi-darkness and the music began.
The pianist, who had an exotic name, played Chopin and Liszt and ended with a piece by a contemporary composer.
For dinner, we went to a restaurant near the theatre. It’s called Perbacco and I like it a lot because, among other things, it stays open late, even when there are only a few customers.
“So what did you think of the concert, did you like it?” Nadia asked me after the owner had uncorked an Aglianico from Basilicata.<
br />
“Chopin and Liszt were… well, they were Chopin and Liszt. I understand them, I like them, and the playing seemed good, as far as I could tell. The sonata by that Armenian was a bit more problematic.”
“He isn’t Armenian, he’s Lithuanian.”
“The fact remains that for the whole of that half hour I had homicidal impulses.”
“You aren’t a real intellectual.”
“You can bet on it.”
Nadia took a sip of her wine and smiled slightly shamefacedly. “I found it unbearable, too. At university I took an entire course on contemporary music, and thought I’d started to understand. So there are two possibilities: either I’m stupid, or this Lithuanian fellow is completely beyond comprehension.”
“Or else the problem is with a certain kind of contemporary music in general. Maybe only those who compose it and study it are capable of understanding it. In fifty years’ time, will anybody still be listening to it, apart from specialists? For example, who today still reads the nouveau roman writers, like Robbe-Grillet?”
“Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay of Last Year at Marienbad.”
“My point exactly. Apart from those who’ve studied cinema, like you, who today still watches Last Year at Marienbad? Even supposing anybody watched it fifty years ago when it came out.”
“It won the Golden Lion at Venice. Have you seen it?”
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