And then I gave her my present. It was a watch, a man’s watch with a leather strap and a big face. Just like one I had had years before. She used to steal it from me because she liked it so much. Then, away on some trip, I lost it and she was upset. Much more than I was. I often thought of giving her another the same but never did. Just as I had never done lots of other things.
She put it on without a word. And then it was time to go home.
I stopped the car some way from her door, where there happened to be a free space. I switched off the engine, turned towards her, and didn’t know what to do. Sara, on the contrary, did know. She hugged me tightly, almost violently, her chin on my shoulder and her head against mine. This for several seconds before breaking away. Thank you, she murmured before opening the car door and walking away.
Thank you, thank you, I said to the empty car as she disappeared into the doorway.
39
I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t even try to go to bed. I sat on the balcony and listened to the sounds from down in the street. I lit four or five cigarettes, but I didn’t smoke much of them. I let them burn down slowly between my fingers while I gazed at the windows and balconies opposite, the antennae on the roofs, the sky.
A little before dawn the mistral got up and the very first gusts made me shiver.
They say the mistral lasts for three days or for seven, so I knew that for three days or for seven it wouldn’t be hot. Not too hot anyway.
I had always loved the summer mistral because it cleansed the air, swept away the mugginess and made one feel freer. It seemed to me appropriate that it should arrive that very morning.
I thought of the old accounts that were closed and the new things beginning. I thought I was afraid, but that for the first time I didn’t want to run away from my fear or hide it. And it seemed to me a tremendous and a wonderful thing.
I watched the light creeping into the sky and the grey clouds that were so strangely out of place in the month of July.
In a short while I would get up and go walking in the still-deserted streets. I would sit at a table in the open, at a bar on the seafront and have a cappuccino. I would watch the streets gradually changing as the day advanced. I would have another cappuccino and smoke a cigarette and then, when it was broad daylight, I would go home. And I would sleep, or read, or go to the sea, and spend the day doing only what I wanted to do.
I would wait until evening came and only then would I ring Margherita. I didn’t know what I would tell her, but I was sure I would find the words.
I thought of all these things and more as I sat on the balcony.
I thought I would not have exchanged that moment for anything.
Not for anything in the world.
A WALK IN THE DARK
Gianrico Carofiglio
When Martina accuses her ex-boyfriend – the son of a powerful local judge – of assault and battery, no witnesses can be persuaded to testify on her behalf, and one lawyer after another refuses to represent her. Guido Guerrieri knows the case could bring his legal career to a premature and messy end, but he cannot resist the appeal of a hopeless cause. Nor deny an attraction to Sister Claudia, the young woman in charge of the shelter where Martina is living, who shares his love of martial arts and his virulent hatred of injustice.
A Walk in the Dark, Carofiglio’s second novel featuring defence counsel Guerrieri, follows on from the critical and commercial success of Involuntary Witness.
PRAISE FOR A WALKIN THE DARK
“Carofiglio is a prosecutor well known for his courageous anti-mafia stance, which has attracted death threats. A Walk in the Dark features an engagingly complex, emotional and moody defence lawyer, Guido Guerrieri, who takes on cases shunned by his colleagues. In passing, Carofiglio provides a fascinating insight into the workings of the Italian criminal justice system.”
Observer
“Part legal thriller, part insight into a man fighting his own demons. Every character in Carofiglio’s fiction has a story to tell and they are always worth hearing. As the author himself is an anti-mafia prosecutor, this powerfully affecting novel benefits from veracity as well as tight writing.”
The Daily Mail
“At one level an exciting courtroom thriller, but what places it in a superior league is the portrayal of a slice of Italian society not normally encountered in crime fiction and an immensely appealing flawed hero.”
The Times
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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 success. 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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BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW Reprinted 2006, 2007, 2010
www.bitterlemonpress.com
First published in Italian as Testimone inconsapevole by Sellerio editore, Palermo, 2002
This edition is published with the financial assistance of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
© Sellerio editore, Palermo, 2002 English translation © Patrick Creagh, 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of Patrick Creagh and Gianrico Carofiglio have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Acknowledgements
P. 86: ‘The Boxer’, Words & Music by Paul Simon © Paul Simon, 1968. Used by Permission of Music Sales Limited. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured. P. 71: ‘The River’ by Bruce Springsteen © Bruce Springsteen, 1980. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. P. 85: ‘Please Forgive Me’ © David Gray, 1998. Reprinted with kind permission of Chrysalis Music Ltd. Extracts from the English Translation of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) on pp. 98, 100 are © Katherine Woods, 1945.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978-1-904-73875-6
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