She smoked it in silence. Savouring every mouthful and letting the smoke waft away into the surrounding darkness. When she’d finished, she closed the window and shivered, as if only just becoming aware of the cold.
“I’m hungry, but I don’t want to be cooped up in a restaurant.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Of course, like all men who live alone, your larder is full of tins and crap like that.”
I told her she shouldn’t believe the stereotypes. No, I didn’t have a larder full of tins. I had fresh, healthy food in the fridge and if I wanted I could even whip up a quick dinner.
So she said all right, let’s go to your place. Ruthlessly suppressing the qualms of my conscience, it struck me that, when you got down to it, there was nothing wrong with the idea. Nothing had to happen. And anyway, it wasn’t my fault. I mean, she’d made all the moves. She’d waited for me outside my office, taken me for a drive, suggested coming to my place. It really wasn’t my fault. If it had been up to me, nothing would have happened.
A heap of bullshit that stayed with me all the way to my apartment.
“What’s that?” It was the first thing she said as soon as she stepped inside the door. She was referring to the punchball hanging in the middle of the room which served as both the hall and the living room. A somewhat bizarre thing to have as part of the furnishings, I admit.
“One of my neuroses. Every evening I come home and punch it for half an hour. Look at it this way. It’s better than getting drunk, taking drugs or beating the wife and kids. Which I don’t have anyway.”
“It’s nice here. Do you like books or are you just a messy person?”
She was referring to the books piled around the sofa and strewn all over the room. I’d never thought about it, but I told her I liked to have them on the floor because they kept me company.
She spotted the kitchen and headed straight for it.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m looking to see what’s in the fridge. I’ll make something.”
With a certain self-importance, I said I’d already sampled her cooking and now, whether she liked it or not, it was her turn to sample mine. She had accepted the risk when she came to my apartment. If she liked, she could stay with me in the kitchen while I was cooking but it was strictly forbidden for her to touch anything.
There wasn’t very much there. I’d exaggerated a bit when I mentioned having lots of fresh food. But I had what I needed to make my speciality. I called it spaghetti al fumo negli occhi. Meaning the cook – in this case, me – throws smoke in people’s eyes, tries to appear more skilful than he really is.
“I’ll make pasta. That’s the most I can rustle up without advance warning.”
Even with advance warning, to tell the truth. But I didn’t say that.
“Pasta and wine are fine. What are you making?”
“You’ll see,” I said, and immediately felt ridiculous. Who the hell do you think you are, Guerrieri? This woman is a professional chef, you idiot. Just get on with it and cook the food.
I fried garlic, oil and chillies in a pan. While the spaghetti was boiling I grated some pecorino, chopped some basil, and stoned and sliced a few black olives. I put the pasta, very al dente, into the frying pan and added the pecorino and the rest.
Natsu said she liked watching me cooking, which made me tingle all over. A nice but dangerous sensation. I didn’t reply, quickly laid the table, told her to sit down, and carried over the brimming plates.
We ate, drank and chatted about nothing, with the punchball standing guard over us.
When we had finished eating, I put on Shangri-la by Mark Knopfler. Then I took my glass and went and sat down on the sofa. She stayed on her chair. When she realized what the disc was, she said she liked ‘Postcards from Paraguay’ a lot. I put the glass down on the floor, reached for the controls and fast-forwarded to track 10.
She came and sat down next to me, on the sofa, just as the song was starting.
One thing was leading to the next, the voice sang.
Spot on, I thought.
It was the last rational thought I had that night.
23
I didn’t have to be in court the next day. I sent Maria Teresa to the courthouse to get some things sorted out at the clerk of the court’s office. Not that any of them were urgent, but I needed to be alone.
I had a few things to think over. Quite a few things.
In the first place, I felt like a shit for what had happened last night. It wasn’t that I’d been taken by surprise, or that I hadn’t had a pretty good idea what might happen. If I’d had a modicum of moral sense, I told myself, I wouldn’t have taken Natsu home with me.
I wondered what I would have said if someone had told me a story like that and asked me what I thought. I mean: what I thought about a lawyer who fucked the wife of one of his clients while that client was in prison.
I would have said that lawyer was a piece of shit.
Part of me was looking for excuses for what had happened, and even finding a few. But overall, my inner prosecutor was winning this case hands down. He was so far out in front that I felt like asking him where the hell he’d been last night when I needed him.
I remembered an after-dinner conversation with some colleagues, some years earlier. We’d had a lot to eat and drink. Some of us were little more than boys, others older, people we’d trained with.
I don’t know who told the story. It was a true story, he said, which had happened a few years earlier.
There was this guy in prison, accused of murder. An almost hopeless case. He needed a lawyer. A very good one, considering the situation he was in.
But he didn’t have the money to pay for a good one. In fact he didn’t even have money to pay for a bad one. What he did have was a beautiful wife. One evening she went to see an old, famous and very good lawyer, who was also a notorious womanizer. She told him she wanted him to defend her husband but didn’t have the money to pay him. So she suggested payment in kind. He accepted, fucked her – repeatedly, in the office and outside – defended the guy and managed to get him acquitted.
End of story, start of discussion.
“What would you have done?”
Various answers. There were some who thought it hadn’t been very good form to do it in the office. Good manners mattered, damn it, whatever the situation. It would have been better to go to a hotel or somewhere else. Others, though, considered that fucking her on the desk was consistent with the nature of the contract they’d entered into. A few timidly expressed ethical qualms, and were howled down.
The young Guerrieri said he would have defended the prisoner for free, without payment in kind, and someone told him he was an idiot and would sing a different tune if something like that ever happened.
Whoever said that was right.
And then I thought of Macri, and the idea that had come to me the night before. On how I could use the information Colaianni had passed on to me to help Paolicelli out of the mess he was in. Gradually, with my mind going back and forth like a ping-pong ball between these two thoughts – what a shit I was, and what to do with my honourable colleague Macri to save my oblivious client Paolicelli – the professional side gained the upper hand.
My idea was to call him as a witness.
It was a crazy idea, because you don’t call a lawyer as a witness for the defence. Apart from the fact that there could be an objection on the grounds of lawyer-client confidentiality, calling a lawyer is something that just isn’t done, and that’s it.
I’d never actually seen it done. I didn’t even know if having previously been the defendant’s counsel constituted a formal impediment to being a witness – what they called a conflict of interest.
So first of all I took a look at the code. It turned out there was no a priori conflict of interest. It could be done, theoretically anyway.
It was the kind of situation in which you really need a second opinion. Not for the first time, I realized I
didn’t have a single colleague I could turn to. I didn’t trust many of them, and none of them were really my friends. For something like this, I needed a friend who knew what he was talking about. And could keep his mouth shut.
I could only think of two people. Curiously, both were prosecutors. Colaianni and Alessandra Mantovani.
I didn’t really want to call Colaianni again, but it struck me that this was a good opportunity to talk to Alessandra again after all this time. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since she’d left Bari to work in the Prosecutor’s Department in Palermo. She’d been escaping from something, like many people. Only she had done it more decisively than most.
She answered after a lot of rings, just when I was about ready to hang up. We exchanged a few jokes, the kind you tell to re-establish contact, to revive the old familiarity.
“It’s nice to hear from you, Guerrieri. I sometimes think you and I should have got together. Things might have gone better for me. Instead, the only men I meet are losers, which starts to be a bit of problem when you’re already forty.”
I am a loser. I’m a bigger loser than any of the men you go out with. I’m also an idiot and if you knew what I did last night you’d agree with me.
I didn’t say that. I said we still had time, if she really liked lawyers with a dubious past and an uncertain future. I’d go to Palermo, she could dismiss her police escort, and we’d see how it worked out.
She laughed. Then she repeated that it was nice to hear from me, and maybe it was time to tell her the reason I was calling. I told her. She listened carefully, stopping me only to ask if I could clarify a few points. When I’d finished, I asked her what she thought of my idea.
“It’s true that in theory a defence counsel’s testimony is admissible. In practice, I very much doubt they’ll allow you to call him unless you can give them a good reason-a very good reason – to do so. And your suspicions aren’t a very good reason.”
“I know, that’s my problem in a nutshell. I need to find a way to get that testimony admitted.”
“You need to put the defendant on the stand first, and his wife. Let them tell the story of how this lawyer came to be involved. Then you can try, though I wouldn’t bet on the result. Appeal court judges don’t like to go to too much trouble.”
“Let’s suppose they admit the testimony. In your opinion, can he refuse to answer on the grounds of lawyer-client confidentiality?”
She thought for a few moments before replying. “In my opinion, no. Lawyer-client confidentiality is there to safeguard the interests of the client. He could claim it if he thought his testimony would be prejudicial to his former client. When you put it like that… I don’t know if there are any precedents.”
“Of course, I could get my client to state that he releases his former counsel from the obligation to observe lawyer-client confidentiality.”
“Yes. That should clinch it. But if I were you I’d read up on this thoroughly and buy a bulletproof vest before I started down this track.”
By the time the call was over, I felt better than I had a few minutes earlier, and my idea seemed a lot less ridiculous.
24
In the afternoon I cycled over to the prison. I had to make a real effort, because the idea of seeing Paolicelli, less than a day after what had happened, didn’t do much to increase my self-esteem.
But I had to go, because my plan of action was a risky one. And he was the person who’d be taking most of the risks. So I had to explain everything to him, make sure he understood, ask him if he wanted us to try that strategy.
As he entered the interview room, a few scattered images from the previous night suddenly sprang into my head, but fortunately it was only for a moment. When we started talking the images vanished.
I explained to him what the idea was. I told him it was worth a try, but he shouldn’t be under any illusions: it was unlikely that the judges would admit Macri’s testimony, and even if they did, it was very unlikely that it would make much difference to the outcome. But in the situation we were in, it was the only alternative to plea-bargaining – although the option of plea-bargaining should be kept open until the day of the hearing.
He made a simple gesture with his hand, as if swatting away a midge or moving a small object. No plea-bargaining, it meant.
I liked that gesture. I liked the dignity of it. I felt an odd kind of solidarity with him.
Maybe it was my way of processing my sense of guilt. I’m going to end up liking the guy, I thought. And that really would be too much.
So I went on explaining to him how we could proceed, how we could try to play the few cards we had in our hands.
“This would be the sequence: first I ask to examine you, then your wife. The judges will allow that, there shouldn’t be any problems. You state that you know nothing about the drugs. It’s true that you admitted responsibility when you were arrested, but only because you wanted to keep your wife out of it. You suggest a hypothesis on how the cocaine came to be in your car. Then I ask you about your lawyer and you tell us how that relationship started. Your wife tells us the same story, from her point of view.”
I looked him in the eyes. He sustained my gaze, with an interrogative undertone in his. What did my look mean? I told him what it meant.
“Obviously this is a dangerous game we’d be playing. We’re on a knife-edge. The only way it has any chance of working is if you’ve told me the whole truth. If you haven’t, then both you and I are running very serious risks. In court and especially outside court, remembering the kind of people we’re probably dealing with.”
“I’ve told you the truth. The drugs weren’t mine. I did some stupid things in the past, but those drugs weren’t mine.”
What stupid things? The question flashed for a moment in my head and then disappeared, as quickly as it had come, to give way to the same feeling I’d had a little earlier. A liking for him that I didn’t want to feel, but which was seeping in like smoke through the cracks in my conscience.
OK. Better to go on.
“I’ll have to question you about what you and this lawyer talked about. In particular, and this is the most important thing, I’ll have to ask you if you ever asked him to account for his being there.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow.”
“I’ll ask you this: when you met Avvocato Macri, either the first time or any of the subsequent times, did you ask him who had suggested him to your wife? Do you understand why I have to ask that?”
“Yes, yes. I do now.”
“In fact, while we’re at it, answer the question now. That way we can start to memorize it.”
He concentrated, touching his chin. The room was silent and I could hear the noise of his fingers rubbing his stubble the wrong way.
“I think it was the second time we met. The first time was just after my arrest, I hadn’t seen my wife yet and so she hadn’t told me how she’d been advised to appoint him. And anyway I was still in shock, I wasn’t thinking clearly. After the custody order was confirmed, I had my first visit from my wife and she told me about the man who’d stopped her in the street. So when Macri came to visit me again, a few days later, I asked him if he knew who had suggested his name to my wife.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said there was no need to worry about that. He said there were people who wanted to take care of me and they would see to everything. He meant his fee. And it was true, we didn’t pay anything. A few times I tried to ask him when I had to pay, and how much, and he always told me not to worry.”
“Obviously he never told you, or gave you any hint, who these people were?”
“Obviously not.”
“All right. Then you’ll have to tell me about the other conversations you had with him, especially the one where you quarrelled. I need you to remember as many details as you can. They’ll help to make what you say more credible. Keep a notebook in your cell and write down everything you remember. Even if it’s somethin
g insignificant. All right?”
The interview was over. We called the guards, who took him back to the bowels of the prison. As I walked back through gates and locks and reinforced doors towards the outside world, I was in a contradictory state of mind.
On the one hand, I still felt like a bastard. But we’re all good at finding excuses, ways of justifying our actions.
So I told myself, all right, I’d made a mistake, but in the overall balance sheet we were more or less equal. Maybe I was even in credit. I might save this man’s life. What other lawyer would have done what I was doing for him?
Getting on my bicycle, I wondered if Natsu would pick me up from my office again, or if she would call me.
Of if I would have the guts to call her.
25
There followed a succession of strange days. Even the texture of them was strange. Packed, and at the same time suspended, as if time had stood still.
Every now and again I would think about Margherita. Sometimes I wondered what she was doing. If she was seeing anyone, if she would ever come back. My thoughts stopped at that point. I never wondered what would happen if she came back. Whenever I thought she was going out with someone I would feel a twinge of jealousy, but it didn’t last long. Sometimes, in the evening, I would get the desire to call her, but I never did.
We had talked over the phone during the first months she was away. They had not been long calls and gradually, spontaneously, they had stopped after the Christmas holidays. She had stayed there, over those holidays, and I had thought that must mean something. Congratulations, Guerrieri, good thinking.
I hadn’t wanted to think about it any more than that.
Little by little, I had taken all my things out of her apartment. Every time I went there I felt as if I was being watched, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. So I took what I needed and got out of there as quickly as I could.
In the evening, after work, I’d go to the gym, or else do a bit of training at home. Then I’d have dinner and start reading or listening to music.
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