Involuntary Witness

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  In point of fact, the woman had nothing to do with the bankruptcy, the insolvency, the firm or the law. The real owner of the firm was her husband, who had already gone bust once and had a record of swindling, embezzlement and indecent behaviour.

  He had registered his fertilizer business in his wife’s name, had made her sign masses of promissory notes, had not paid his workers, had not paid his electricity bills, had not paid his telephone bills, but had raided the till.

  Naturally the firm had gone bust and the titular owner had been accused of fraudulent bankruptcy. The husband had chivalrously allowed justice to take its course and his wife to be found guilty, albeit with plea-bargaining.

  I had been paid the week before, without submitting an invoice. With the money from the till or acquired from goodness knows what other swindle on the part of Signor De Carne.

  One of the first things you learn as a criminal lawyer, especially when dealing with types like De Carne, is to get paid in advance.

  Obviously you are almost always, or at least very often, paid with money obtained by criminal means.

  It shouldn’t really be mentioned, but when you defend a professional pusher who pays you ten, twenty, even thirty million if you manage to get him out of prison, well, you’re bound to have some vague doubt about the source of that money.

  If you are defending a man arrested for persistent extortion in complicity with persons unknown, and his friends come to the office and tell you not to worry about the fee, they’ll take care of it, here too you can make a guess that that fee will not be composed of spotlessly clean money.

  Let me make it clear that I was no better than the rest of them, even if I did sometimes try to retain a morsel of dignity. Not with types like De Carne, however.

  In short, I had in any case been paid in advance with money from an unknown – and dubious – source, I had concluded a decorous plea-bargaining that at least guaranteed the poor woman a suspended sentence, and as far as that morning was concerned I could go home.

  I took advantage of a lull in the rain, did my shopping, reached my apartment and had hardly begun to make myself a salad when my mobile rang.

  Yes, I was Guido. Of course I remembered her, Melissa. Yes, at dinner with Renato. It had been a very pleasant evening. Liar. No, I didn’t mind that she’d got hold of my mobile number, far from it. Did I know who Acid Steel were? Sorry, I didn’t. Ah, well there was a concert of this Acid Steel lot in Bari this evening. Well, near Bari anyway. Would I like to go along with her? Yes, but what about tickets? Ah, she had two tickets, in fact two invitations. Fine. Then it’s agreed, tell me your address and I’ll pick you up. You’ll come here? Very well. Ah, you already know where I live. Very good, this evening at eight, yes, don’t worry, I won’t dress like a lawyer. Ciao. Ciao.

  I remembered Melissa very well. About ten days previously my friend Renato, a former hippie now working in the art side of advertising, was celebrating his fortieth birthday. Melissa had arrived in the company of a stumpy little chartered accountant wearing black trousers, a black elasticated pullover, a black Armani-style jacket, and black hair long over the ears, non-existent on top.

  She had not passed unobserved. Levantine face, five foot eight, quite unsettling curves. Even an apparently intelligent expression.

  The accountant thought he had picked an ace that evening. But instead he had the two of spades with clubs as trumps. No sooner had she entered than Melissa was on friendly terms with practically every male at the party.

  She had chatted with me too, no more and no less than with the others, it seemed to me. She had shown interest in the fact that I boxed. She had told me that she was studying biology, that she was going to do postgraduate studies in France, that I was a charming fellow, that I didn’t seem like a lawyer at all and that we’d certainly be meeting again.

  Then she went on to the next one.

  Time was – a year before – when I would have dashed to retrieve her from the jungle of illintentioned males who populated the party. I would have thought up something, given her my mobile number, tried to invent excuses for meeting again as soon as possible. And the inky-cloaked accountant could drop dead. He, however, was actively engaged in knocking back one cocktail after another, so he would soon be dead of cirrhosis anyway.

  But that evening I did nothing about it.

  When the party ended I’d gone home and gone to bed. When I woke up after the usual four hours, Melissa was already far, far away, practically invisible.

  Now, ten days later, she called me on my mobile to invite me to a concert by Acid Steel, who were playing in Bari. Or rather, near Bari. Just like that.

  I had an odd feeling. For a moment I was tempted to ring back and say no, I unfortunately had another engagement. Sorry, it had slipped my mind, perhaps some other time.

  Then I said out loud, “Brother, you’re going really mad. Really mad. You go to this bloody Acid Steel concert and let’s put an end to this nonsense. You’re thirty-eight years old and have a pretty long life-expectancy. D’you think you’re going to spend it all like this? Go to this bloody concert and be thankful.”

  Melissa arrived punctually a few minutes after eight. She was on foot and her attire was an incitement to crime.

  She said that her car wouldn’t start but that she’d come into the centre anyway, and was wondering if we had time to get mine. We did. We got the car and set off in the direction of Taranto.

  The concert was in a small, disused industrial warehouse out in the country between Turi and Rutigliano. I’d never have been able to get there on my own.

  The atmosphere in the place was semi-clandestine. Some of the audience looked clandestine without the semi.

  Luckily, one was not forbidden to smoke.

  One was not forbidden to smoke anything.

  And in fact they were smoking everything and drinking beer. The air was dense with the stench of smoke, beer, beery breath and sweaty armpits. No one was laughing and many seemed absorbed in a dark, mysterious ritual from which I – fortunately – was excluded.

  I began to feel uneasy, and the impulse to make a run for it grew and grew.

  Melissa talked to everyone and knew everyone. Or maybe she was simply doing a repeat performance of Renato’s party. In that case, I thought, I was in the accountant’s shoes. The impulse to cut and run redoubled. Worry. Worry. I felt prying eyes on me. More worry.

  Then, luckily, Acid Steel started to play.

  I have no wish to talk about the two hours of uninterrupted so-called music, partly because my most intense recollection is not the sounds but the smells. The beer, the cigarettes, the joints, the sweat and I don’t know what else seemed more and more to fill the air of that gloomy warehouse. For a moment I even had the absurd notion that from one minute to the next it would explode, hurling that deadly cocktail of stenches off into space. The positive aspect of this eventuality was that Acid Steel – whose visible perspiration led one to suppose that they made a determining contribution to the fetor – would also be hurled into space and no one would hear of them ever again.

  The warehouse did not explode. Melissa drank five or six beers and smoked several cigarettes. I am not sure that they were only cigarettes, because it was pesky dark and the source of the smells – including that of joints – was indefinable. At a certain point I seemed to see her wash down a few pills with her beer.

  I confined myself to smoking my cigarettes and drinking the occasional sip of beer from the bottles Melissa handed me.

  When the concert came to an end I refrained from buying the Acid Steel CD on sale at the exit.

  Melissa greeted a bunch of characters with whom I feared we might have to spend the evening, but then she took my hand. In the darkness of the churned-up field that served as a car park I felt the blood rush to my face, and elsewhere.

  “Shall we go and have a drink?” she gurgled in a strangely suggestive voice, meanwhile stroking the back of my hand with her thumb.

  “Ma
ybe we could eat something too.” I was thinking of the pints of beer already swilling about inside her and of the other unspecified psychoactive substances circulating in her blood and among the neurones.

  “You bet. I really feel like something sweet. A crêpe with Nutella or with cream and a dark chocolate sauce.”

  We returned to Bari and went to the Gauguin, where they made very good crêpes, were polite and nice, and had beautiful photographs on the walls. It was a place I had often been to when I was with Sara, and had not visited since. That evening was the first time.

  No sooner inside than I was sorry I’d come. Familiar faces at every table. Some I had to greet, all knew who I was.

  Between the tables, the owner and the waiters staring at us. Staring at me. I could hear the wheels turning in their heads. I knew they’d gossip about me now. I felt like a squalid forty-year-old who takes out teenagers.

  Melissa, meanwhile, was relaxed and talking non-stop.

  I chose a crêpe with ham, walnuts and mascarpone, plus a small bottle of beer. Melissa had two sweet crêpes, the first with Nutella, hazelnuts and banana, the second with ricotta, raisins and melted chocolate. She drank three glasses of Calvados. She talked a lot. Two or three times she touched my hand. Once, while talking, she suddenly stopped and gave me an intense look, almost imperceptibly biting her lower lip.

  They’re shooting with a hidden camera, I thought. This girl is an actress, there’s a TV camera somewhere, now I’ll say or do something ridiculous and someone will pop out and tell me to smile at the audience.

  No one popped out. I paid the bill, we left, reached the car and I started up. Melissa said we could round off the evening by having a drink at her place.

  “No thanks. You’re an alcoholic and maybe something worse. I shall now take you home, I won’t come up, and then I’ll go home to bed.” That’s what I should have said.

  “I’d love to. Maybe just a drop and then we’ll get some sleep because tomorrow is a working day.” I said exactly that: “maybe just a drop”.

  Melissa gave me a kiss on the corner of my mouth, lingering over it. She smelt of booze, smoke and a strong perfume that reminded me of something. Then she said that she didn’t have much at home and so we’d better go to a bar and buy a few beers.

  I wasn’t entirely easy in my mind but I stopped in front of an all-night bar, got out and bought two beers. To prevent the situation from degenerating.

  She lived in an old block of council flats near the television studios. The sort of building populated by five or six foreigners living in one room, old council tenants (a species on the verge of extinction) and students away from home. Melissa came from Minervino Murge.

  The entrance had a very dim bulb that shed no light whatever. Melissa lived on the first floor and the stairs smelt of cat pee.

  She opened the door and went in first, with me following her into the darkness. Stuffiness and stale cigarette smoke.

  When the light went on I saw I was in a minute hallway that gave onto a study-cum-bedroom on the left. On the right was a closed door that I took to be the bathroom.

  “Where is the kitchen?” was my fatuous thought of the moment. And at the same instant she took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom/study/living room. There was a bed against the wall opposite the door, a desk, books everywhere. Books on shelves, stacks of books on the floor, books on the desk, books scattered here and there. There was an old radio-tape recorder, an ashtray containing two squashed filters, a few empty beer bottles and a nearly empty bottle of J&B whisky.

  The books ought to have reassured me.

  When I enter a house for the first time I check on whether there are books, if they are few, if they are many, if they are too neatly arranged – which is a bad sign – or if they are all over the place – which is a good sign, and so on.

  The books in Melissa’s tiny home should have given me a good impression. But they didn’t.

  “Do sit down,” said Melissa, pointing to the bed.

  I sat, she opened the beers, handed me one and drank more than half of hers without taking the neck of the bottle from her lips. I took a sip, just to show willing. My brain was searching frantically for an excuse to escape. After all, it was nearly two o’clock in the morning, I had to work the following day, we had had a pleasant evening, we would certainly be seeing each other again, don’t worry I’ll call you, and anyway I’ve got a slight headache. No, there’s nothing the matter except the fact that you’re an alcoholic, a drug addict, probably a nymphomaniac and I want to cry. I’ll call you, really I will.

  While I was struggling to think up something less pathetic, Melissa – who in another single gulp had finished her beer – slipped off her panties (black) from under her skirt.

  She didn’t want to waste too much time on preliminaries and other boring formalities. So much was obvious.

  And in fact there were no formalities.

  I stayed in that place, what with this and that, until nearly daylight.

  While she smoked and finished the bottle of whisky she recited the difficulties of living away from home with next to nothing coming from her parents. Of paying the month’s rent, of eating – and of drinking, I thought – of buying cigarettes, clothes, paying for the mobile, having the odd evening out. And books, of course. The occasional job – hostess, public relations – hardly ever brought in enough.

  That month, for example, she was already late with the rent, had an exam to prepare for, and the landlady waiting for nothing better than an excuse to chuck her out.

  If she wouldn’t be offended, I could lend her a little. No, she wouldn’t be offended, but I had to promise that I’d make her pay it back. Of course, don’t worry. No, I haven’t got half a million in cash, but look, here’s 220,000 in my wallet, I’ll keep the twenty just in case. Don’t worry about it, you’ll let me have it back when you can, there’s no hurry. I really must go now, because tomorrow, that is today, I have to work.

  She gave me her mobile number. Of course I’ll call you, I said, screwing up the slip of paper in my pocket, wrenching open the door and fleeing like a scalded cat.

  Outside was a leaden dawn, a mouse-coloured sky. The puddles were so black they reflected nothing.

  My eyes reflected nothing either.

  There came to mind a film I had seen a couple of years before, The Ghost and the Darkness, a splendid yarn about big-game hunters and lions.

  Val Kilmer asks Michael Douglas, “Have you ever failed?”

  The reply: “Only in life.”

  The next day I changed my sim-card and mobile phone number.

  11

  The days that followed that night were not memorable.

  About a week passed, then we were notified that the inquiries were concluded.

  At eight-thirty next morning I was in Cervellati’s secretariat to request copies of the file. I made the application, they told me that I could have copies within three days and I left the offices prey to pessimism.

  On the Friday my secretary called at the public prosecutor’s office, paid the fees, collected the copies and brought them to the office.

  I spent Saturday and Sunday reading and re-reading those papers.

  I read, smoked, and drank big cups of weak decaffeinated coffee.

  I read, smoked, and what I read I didn’t like a bit. Abdou Thiam was in a pretty pickle.

  It was even worse than I’d thought when I read the detention order.

  It looked like one of those cases without any prospects, in which going to the Assizes could lead only to a pointless massacre.

  It looked as if Cervellati was right and that the only way of reducing the damage was to opt for the shortened procedure.

  The thing that nailed my client most of all was the testimony of the barman. He had made a statement to the carabinieri the day before Abdou was arrested. He had been heard again, a few days later, by the public prosecutor in person.

  A perfect witness – for the prosecution.
>
  I read and re-read the two reports, on the look-out for any weak points, but I found almost nothing.

  That of the carabinieri was a summary report written in the most classic police-station jargon.

  On the 10th day of August 1999 at 19.30 hours, in the offices of the Operations Unit of the Carabinieri of Monopoli, before the undermentioned non-commissioned officers of the criminal police Sergeant-Major Lorussa Antonio, Sergeant Sciancalepore Pasquale and Lance-Corporal Amendolagine Francesco, all of whom are attached to the aforementioned Command, there appeared Antonio Renna, born Noci (Bari) 31.3.1953, resident in Monopoli, Contrada Gorgofreddo 133/c, who when properly questioned as to facts falling within his cognizance stated as follows:

  Witness replied: I am the proprietor of the commercial premises denominated “Bar Maracaibo” situated in Contrada Capitolo, Monopoli. During the summer months my premises remain open from seven in the morning until nine at night. In the management of the aforesaid commercial concern I am assisted by my wife and two of my children.

  Witness replied: I was acquainted with little Francesco Rubino and in particular with his grandparents, who are proprietors of a villa situated at a distance of approximately 300 yards from my bar. They have been spending holidays in Contrada Capitolo for many years. The grandfather of the child frequently visits my bar to purchase and consume a coffee and smoke a cigarette.

  Witness replied: I am acquainted with the non-European citizen whom you inform me is named Abdou Thiam and whom I recognize in the photograph you have submitted for my inspection. He deals in counterfeit leather goods and passes nearly every day in front of my bar on his way to the beaches where he sells his wares. On occasion he visits my bar to take refreshment.

  Witness replied: I recall having observed the aforesaid non-European citizen on the afternoon of the boy’s disappearance. He passed in front of my commercial premises without the bag which he habitually carries with him and he was walking rapidly as if in haste. He did not stop at the bar.

  Witness replied: The non-European citizen was proceeding in a northerly-southerly direction. In effect, he was coming from the direction of Monopoli and proceeding towards the beaches.