The Measure of Time

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  “I didn’t deal with it. It was Dad and Pinelli” – the man Lorenza had rightly described as an idiot – “but I’m familiar with the paperwork.”

  Paperwork. A man who’d been in prison for quite some time and who in all probability would be there for a long time to come. Paperwork. Vocabulary reveals a lot about people, I thought. Then I thought that maybe my reflections were banal. It often happens, I can’t help myself. Mariella Costamagna continued speaking.

  “I think there’s still some money pending, but don’t worry. Considering the circumstances, we won’t insist.”

  I had to hold back a few rude remarks. If Lorenza had told me the truth about the fees she’d been charged – and I didn’t have many doubts about that, knowing Costamagna – it was a lie to state that there was money pending. Even worse, it was actually obscene. More or less like the use of the word paperwork.

  “Anyway, I don’t envy you,” she went on. “It’s an open-and-shut case, Dad said. The kid’s guilty, there’s not much you can do. At most try to limit the damage. Maybe, if he confesses, you could get a slightly reduced sentence.”

  We hung up and the nasty feeling left by these last words remained with me the whole afternoon, like an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I was seized with a kind of urgency to read the case file and find out how things stood.

  I asked Pasquale to make three copies of the ruling. One for Consuelo, one for Annapaola, one for Tancredi.

  Annapaola is a private investigator who used to be a crime reporter, and even before that all kinds of other things, not all of them as clear as day. It’s thanks to her that I overcame my entrenched scepticism towards her profession. Until I entrusted her with an investigation and saw the results, I was convinced that private investigators were basically good at three things: finding evidence of marital infidelity, in all its varied and often imaginative forms (they’re almost all good at that); getting defence lawyers in trouble, so that they end up on trial for aiding and abetting; and earning large sums of money without producing any results other than verbose and pointless reports.

  Annapaola also deals with investigations into marital infidelity – she has to make a living – but whenever she gets to investigate more serious (sometimes very serious) matters, she’s capable of making the most unexpected discoveries, of getting the most unlikely people to talk. Whether she’s working for the accused or – which, like Consuelo, she prefers – for the victim.

  Incidentally, she’s also my girlfriend. More or less. The jury’s still out on the definition. A few months earlier we happened to talk about it one evening at my place, after dinner.

  “But do you tell other people I’m your girlfriend, Guerrieri?”

  “I thought you’d forbidden me. So: no.”

  “Oh yes. You’re right. Good. I like it when you obey me.” She paused then continued: “But it also bothers me a bit.”

  “What does?”

  “I thought that if you’d replied yes I’d have been upset. Now that you tell me no I’m more upset. Am I consistent?”

  “You’re consistency personified. That’s why you’re my girlfriend but also my non-girlfriend. Scott Fitzgerald said the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time is the test of a first-rate intelligence.”

  “Have I ever told you your quotations are a bit tiresome?”

  “I think you have.”

  “Anyway, getting back to the whole girlfriend thing. I’d like you to say it and not say it. It’s not so complicated. You’re a lawyer, it’s your job to say one thing and mean the opposite. Find a way.”

  “This conversation reminds me of the joke about the Jewish mother who gives her son two ties for his birthday.”

  “I know I won’t be able to stop you telling me it.”

  “No, you won’t. So, there’s this Jewish mother who gives her son two ties. The next day he puts one of them on and goes to see her. She looks at him sadly. ‘I knew it – you don’t like the other one.’”

  “I thought it’d be worse,” she commented, and after a few seconds, as if all at once she’d had a brilliant idea, added: “Of course, if I’m not your girlfriend, it becomes more interesting. You know what I think? We could indulge in steamy clandestine sex.”

  “We could,” I admitted.

  Carmelo Tancredi had been a policeman. I might even say he was the best cop I’d ever known, except, maybe, for an old marshal of carabinieri in Turin. He’d worked for more than thirty years in the Flying Squad, had retired with the rank of deputy chief inspector and had recently graduated with a degree in psychology.

  But then it had struck him that he wasn’t tired of working (especially not that work: talking to people, making people talk, discovering what happened, how it happened and who it was) and had no desire to go fishing every day in his dinghy, even though he loves that boat more than if it were a Labrador puppy. Fishing a couple of times a month is wonderful, he told me once; fishing a couple of times a week starts to seem like a nightmare.

  So when Annapaola, after a dinner the three of us had had, suggested to him that they join forces and set up a real detective agency, he’d taken just five minutes to accept. Since then they had worked together – often for my practice, sometimes for other people. Apart from anything else, I think they have a lot of fun.

  I got home, stooping under the weight of my rucksack, which was filled with the two folders Lorenza had left for me. The ruling, documents relating to the investigation, trial transcripts.

  “Hi, Mr Punchbag,” I said, addressing the punchbag hanging by a chain from a beam in the middle of the living room. He gave an imperceptible nod. He’s a taciturn fellow, who doesn’t much like to move unless it’s absolutely necessary. Which naturally happens when we both do a bit of boxing. He takes the punches very calmly. He never reacts. He takes and I give, but he always wins in the end. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, I guess. One of these days I’ll find out what it is.

  We’re friends, Mr Punchbag and I. He isn’t demonstrative, that’s for sure, but it’s also sure that he conceals delicate feelings behind that impassive leather mask of his.

  We went through a difficult time, the day of my fiftieth birthday. The kids (I include Pasquale among the kids, even though he’s in his seventies) had bought me a lovely, shiny new punchbag, the kind you see in the glossy videos showing world champions like Floyd Mayweather Jr pretending to train. (A great boxer, by the way, but too much of a pin-up for my taste.)

  The idea was that I should finally replace that old object that had taken too many punches and was full of cracks and patched up with duct tape. You could even say there was something undignified about it.

  After the surprise party organized by Annapaola (I was inclined to think there was nothing to celebrate, but I realize that’s rather an obvious position) we’d been left alone, he and I. Or rather, we weren’t alone. There, hanging on a wall, calm and self-assured, almost mocking, was the new one.

  I sat down on the sofa facing Mr Punchbag. One of the cracks on his surface, a result of the thousands of punches so politely taken, gave him a very melancholy expression. Like that of a dog that’s about to be abandoned at the side of the road by a thoughtless master. Or better still: by a total arsehole.

  “Are you sad, friend?” I’d asked in embarrassment. He, in his dignified way, had not replied, conscious that the life of things, like that of people, has a childhood, an adulthood and an ending.

  Like an idiot, I felt moved. What was I doing with that beautiful new shiny brown leather bag with its gold lettering? How did I know if it was able to listen – and therefore to talk – like Mr Punchbag? I spent about ten psychiatrically significant minutes sitting on the sofa, balanced precariously between two somewhat incompatible lines of thought.

  The first said: It’s fine to play, it’s fine to indulge in the notion of talking to this old inanimate object, but every whim must have a limit. Things are things, we can project our needs and fantasies onto them,
and up to a point that’s fine. Confusing them with living beings, however, is deranged, a sign of immaturity, something like believing you can read fortunes in coffee dregs. Don’t be a child, hang this beautiful new leather punchbag and get rid of the other one. Take it down to the street, put it in a dustbin, and have done with it.

  The second said: Are you that kind of person? What about all the evenings you’ve spent together, all the things you’ve confided in him, all the times he’s listened to you, all the advice he’s given you – don’t they mean anything to you?

  I can’t guarantee those were the exact words, but I swear this was the tone of the inner dialogue (to tell the truth, I’m not even sure that it was only inner and that I hadn’t got carried away and actually started speaking out loud).

  It lasted half an hour.

  Then I made up my mind. The new bag would go in the office, in the conference room. Completely useless, but it was so beautiful and elegant – a piece of decoration, a bathroom salesman would have said – that it could happily hang in an office as a designer item. My colleagues wouldn’t be offended, thinking that I hadn’t appreciated their gift, and I wouldn’t commit an act so horrible as that of betraying an old friend.

  I took some duct tape, stuck it over Mr Punchbag in the places where the cracks were most noticeable and gave him a little punch, just an amicable little punch. Partly because without gloves, friend or no friend, it hurts. He looked at me with gratitude, and the crisis was over.

  All right, I’ve digressed.

  So: I had a rucksack full of transcripts and a specific schedule.

  First of all I went a few rounds and chatted a little with Mr Punchbag.

  After the punches, a few press-ups and some work on the horizontal bar. The horizontal bar was a novelty. Months earlier, on the fitness trail at the San Francesco pine grove, I’d had a bet with Annapaola about which of us could do the most pull-ups. I’d lost, eleven to her fourteen. Now, eleven wouldn’t be all that bad for a man over fifty – the problem is that mechanisms as irrational as they are difficult to control are triggered whenever you’re in physical competition with a woman. Even if she is more than ten years younger, used to be a semi-professional athlete and has the biceps of a good middleweight. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’d had a horizontal bar installed in the entrance, made by a manufacturer who was somewhat surprised by the order, and now I exercised in secret every other day, hoping I would get my revenge for the humiliation sooner or later.

  Having finished my exercises, I took a quick shower and, following the schedule I’d drawn up, made myself spaghetti all’assassina.

  It’s a typical Bari recipe, deceptively easy to prepare.

  I got the instructions, handwritten in an exercise book, from an old lady in Bari, and as usual I followed them strictly.

  Pour a few spoonfuls of oil into a large pan and add some finely chopped garlic and chilli peppers. When the garlic is golden, add passata, some small tomatoes, washed and cut in half, and a pinch of salt. Cook for ten minutes on a low heat while you boil salted water.

  Cook the spaghetti in the water for just three minutes, drain it and add it to the sauce, having first removed the garlic. Finish cooking the spaghetti in the sauce until it has absorbed it. Increase the heat until you’ve got rid of the moisture and the spaghetti is seared and crunchy.

  It’s a dish that, for reasons I can’t explain, cheers me up. Maybe, as somebody once said, it reminds me of something I can’t remember.

  In any case, I opened a bottle of Cacc’e mmitte di Lucera, a gift from a satisfied client (it does happen sometimes) and had dinner. I was actually in a good mood.

  Then I washed up, poured myself another glass of wine, regretted for the millionth time that I’d quit smoking and sat down at the table, with the case file in front of me.

  4

  The ruling was of average quality. Written in the usual jargon of legal documents, a little long-winded but thorough and, at first sight, technically sound.

  It began with a summary of the investigation. On the day of the murder, the accused and the victim had spoken twice on the phone. Both the conversations had been intercepted and recorded because the telephone of the victim – Cosimo Gaglione, known as Mino – was being tapped within the context of an investigation by the Narcotics section of the Flying Squad. From these telephone calls, which were quite short, it could be inferred, according to the prosecution and the judges, that there was an unspecified bone of contention between the two men. During the second call, the accused said very clearly that they needed to discuss the matter face to face. The tone of these words was aggressive and suggested a great deal of anger on Cardace’s part and the intention to call the other man to account for what apparently seemed to him an unfair or disrespectful act.

  In the afternoon Cardace was seen by a witness in the vicinity of Gaglione’s apartment, not long before the murder took place.

  At 7.47 p.m. Gaglione called 118 from his own mobile phone (the one being tapped by Narcotics) asking for urgent help. Speaking in a laboured manner, he said that he was at home, that somebody had shot him and that he was losing a lot of blood. A few minutes later, almost simultaneously, an ambulance and two Flying Squad cars arrived at his building. The police officers, having intercepted the call, had heard his request for help.

  Once on the scene, neither group was able to do anything other than observe that Gaglione was dead. As would later be ascertained by the forensics team and the pathologist, he had been shot three times with a .38 calibre revolver (no cartridges had been found at the scene of the crime): one had hit him glancingly in the side and two more in the right leg, severing the femoral artery and causing him to bleed to death. In the course of the search, a large amount of MDMA had been found. The men from the Flying Squad had set off in search of Cardace. They had tracked him down outside a bar about a couple of hours later, in the company of friends. He had twelve Ecstasy pills on him, of the same kind as those found in Gaglione’s apartment. Cardace had been arrested for possession of narcotics and once at Headquarters had undergone a gunshot residue test.

  Within a few days the technicians of the Forensics department’s central laboratory had communicated their findings: the jacket worn that evening by Cardace was contaminated with particles of lead, barium and antimony derived from the shooting of a firearm. A warrant had then been requested and issued for Cardace’s arrest on the charges of premeditated murder and unauthorized carrying of firearms.

  After this summary of the preliminary investigation, the judge who had written the ruling launched into a long and somewhat pedantic summary of the criteria fixed by law for the evaluation of evidence. At the end of this rather superfluous digression, he moved on to an analytical examination of the individual items of evidence.

  First of all, it is necessary to read and interpret the transcripts of the two telephone calls between the accused and the victim on the day of the murder. In this regard, it is important to make it clear that it was the telephone of the victim, Cosimo Gaglione, which had been under surveillance for about two weeks. These intercepts had been authorized within the context of a wide-ranging investigation relating to the traffic in narcotics of a synthetic type (Ecstasy and methamphetamine). There had already been calls in the previous few days between Gaglione’s telephone and that of the accused. From these calls there emerged elements that led the officers to suspect the involvement of Cardace in this illegal traffic.

  On 13 October at 1.26 p.m., there is a first call from Cardace’s telephone. The substance of the brief conversation is cryptic, but the tone is obviously angry. Cardace seems very upset by events that happened the day before, although the nature of these events is not made clear. The conversation ends abruptly because Gaglione receives another call on another telephone (the ringing can be heard on the recording and this fact is also indicated in the transcript). Gaglione hangs up, saying he will call back.

  The second call is at 4.18 p.m., once again from
the telephone of Cardace, who first of all complains very excitedly that he has not been called back. Gaglione’s answer is very sharp and aggressive (“I’m doing my own stuff, if I want to call I will, if I don’t I won’t, so stop pissing me off” – a translation of the dialect used). Cardace raises his voice and replies that Gaglione should not treat him like this, otherwise he will “smash his face in” and it will not take him long to find a replacement (in all likelihood another supplier of narcotics). At this point, Gaglione becomes worried that the contents of the conversation may be incriminating if it should so happen that their phones are being tapped. He therefore says: “If you want to talk, forget about the phone, I’m at home.”

  Cardace cuts short the conversation, saying in a tone of barely controlled anger: “I’m coming now.”

  What emerges from these two telephone conversations is a situation of serious personal conflict between two individuals involved in an illegal business, in particular a demand that Cardace has to make of Gaglione. The way in which the second call is cut off does not in any way suggest that a reconciliation is imminent and Cardace’s laconic conclusion – “I’m coming now” – points rather to a continuation of the quarrel without the mediation of a telephone call.

  The second item of evidence consists of the statement of the witness Antonia Sassanelli, who works in a cafe in the immediate vicinity of the victim’s residence. She (like many other potential witnesses) was questioned by the police in the immediate aftermath of the crime. She was shown a specially prepared photograph album, which included a photograph of Cardace. The woman stated that she knew him from having seen him on several occasions in the cafe, often in the company of Gaglione, who was well known to her because he lived in the vicinity and was a frequent customer of the cafe. After a first phase of (almost instinctive) reticence towards the police, Sassanelli stated that she had seen Cardace in the cafe that afternoon together with another person she had never seen before. She was not in a position to indicate the exact time but did state that it had happened not very long before the arrival of the police and of “all that kerfuffle”, to quote the witness verbatim. Such statements were reiterated in the course of her testimony in court.