The Measure of Time

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  Tancredi shifted on his chair. “I think I’ll go and talk to a few more of my former colleagues in the Squad, to see if there are any alternative avenues they didn’t follow up on. I want to get a better idea of who the dead man was, how they got on to him in the first place, what circles he moved in, if there were people who didn’t like him. I also want to see what they know about Cardace, apart from what’s written in the file.”

  “I’ll check out the area around Gaglione’s place, plus the cafe where he was seen,” Annapaola said. “In the ruling, there’s no mention of any security footage being admitted in evidence. Is it in any of the other documents?”

  “I don’t think so. To tell the truth, I hadn’t even thought of it.”

  “When I’m over there, then, I’ll see if there are any security cameras. Though of course the footage won’t still be around after two years. But that’s a good reason for you to ask: why didn’t you get hold of it? It’d suggest a shortcoming in the investigation.”

  “Provided that is what happened,” Tancredi said, automatically defending his former colleagues. “Maybe they did get hold of it, maybe they viewed it and didn’t find anything important. In the meantime, significant evidence emerged about Cardace, so they dropped the footage and didn’t even mention it in the reports.”

  “Let’s check. If there are cameras, and nothing was done about the footage, it might be worth bringing it up.”

  I looked around. Nobody added anything else, and we brought the meeting to a close.

  Once again, I didn’t say that I knew the defendant’s mother. That I’d known her (or thought I’d known her) many, many years earlier.

  7

  In my early years in the profession I liked going into prisons. Around the age of thirty, it gave me the feeling I was someone who was dealing with serious things. Someone on whose work serious things depended. Which, to an extent, was true.

  But what interested me was the vain, even narcissistic aspect of the matter, even though I wouldn’t admit it even to myself. So I spoke about going into prisons, having to go there, as if it were an unpleasant duty. But actually, going through those gates that opened and closed behind me gave me an unhealthy sense of gratification. I could access that mysterious, forbidden place whenever I wanted, meet the creatures who were kept there, and leave whenever I wanted.

  With the passing of the years, the gratification gradually faded and turned into routine. That opening and closing and more opening and closing of gates, that creaking of hinges and noise of bolts, those measured steps of men and women in uniform became components of a larger rhythm, regular and repetitive, along with the mornings at the courthouse, filled with hearings and bureaucracy, and the afternoons in the office, filled with clients and case files.

  Finally I went beyond the monotony of routine, and going into a prison became increasingly unbearable. Because of the prison population. I’m not making a theoretical observation, or being what they call a bleeding-heart liberal. I simply find it harder to bear the idea of people confined behind bars. It’s unavoidable, in many cases, but knowing that doesn’t help.

  The name of the sergeant who walked me to the lawyers’ room was Smaldino. He was a kind man, kind to the prisoners, too. He was from a village somewhere inland, and I knew that his hobby was breeding and training dogs. We hadn’t seen each other in a while.

  “How long have you and I known each other, Avvocato Guerrieri?”

  “At least twenty years, I’m sorry to say. Maybe a bit more.”

  “I arrived in Bari twenty-three years ago. I came here from Rebibbia and before that I was in Sardinia. You were one of the first lawyers I met. You were a boy then. So we’ve known each other for twenty-three years.”

  “Not long till your pension now.”

  “Two more years and I’ll be able to devote myself to my dogs full-time.”

  We were walking side by side, the rhythm of our footsteps alternating, and looking ahead of us as we talked. That’s why I didn’t immediately see the grimace that had just passed across Smaldino’s face, but I sensed it from an imperceptible change of tone.

  “Do you remember D’Ippolito?”

  “The inspector with the moustache? Of course I remember him.”

  “He retired last year. And three weeks later he had a stroke. Luckily they didn’t manage to save him, he would have been a vegetable. Ever since it happened, I’ve been scared it could happen to me too. You wait so long for that time of life, you think you’ll be young enough to devote yourself to the things you like. Instead, you die.”

  “Damn, I’m sorry about poor D’Ippolito.” I really was sorry. He was another of those prison officers I’d got on well with. Even the prisoners had spoken well of him. No abuse, no violence.

  “Right. Life’s really absurd.”

  We got to the lawyers’ room.

  “I’ll send you your client now. I’m sorry if I told you a story that’s made you sad.”

  “One day I’d like to come and see your dogs,” I said by way of goodbye.

  His face lit up. “It would be an honour.”

  Sitting down at the desk, I opened my bag, took out the ruling, the trial transcripts and a notepad and laid out everything in front of me.

  It was another five or six minutes before a young officer opened the door and admitted my client: Iacopo Cardace.

  He was of medium height, and solidly built. He was wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt beneath which you could sense the muscles. He had light brown, almost blond hair, and his face was marked with acne scars. His expression was evasive, his eyes half-closed as if he’d only just woken up. Overall, he aroused an immediate antipathy in me.

  It sometimes happens with clients, but with this young man the phenomenon was particularly intense, and it took an effort to suppress the feeling.

  “Good morning, Signor Cardace. As you already know, I’m Avvocato Guerrieri. I think your mother told you I’d be coming to see you.”

  “Are you replacing Costamagna?”

  “Not exactly. I’m here because you appointed me, on the advice of your mother. My practice has no connection with that of Avvocato Costamagna.”

  I became aware that my tone was a little resentful. It was a result of the hostility the boy aroused in me and of the annoyance I felt at being somehow equated to Costamagna.

  He nodded apathetically and sniffed.

  “Right,” I resumed. “Let’s see where we stand at the moment. If anything I say to you isn’t clear, just ask me to explain. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “So, on the day of the hearing we’ll request a brief extension. We’ll do this because you didn’t appoint me until after the time limit for presenting new requests for evidence and possible new grounds for appeal had already passed. So that we can formulate these requests for evidence, and generally plan an effective strategy for your defence, we’re going to need your help. So now I’m going to ask you a few questions.”

  I stopped there. When I have clients charged with serious crimes that involve the use of violence, and in particular when I have clients charged with homicide, I never ask them to tell me the truth.

  I prefer them to decide. Knowing the whole truth can be a double-edged sword.

  Knowing exactly what happened (and therefore also if the client is guilty) helps you get a clearer picture of the territory in which you will have to move. It helps you avoid dangerous topics, arguments that could suddenly be turned against you; it allows you to concentrate on the weak points of the prosecution case without unwittingly turning them into strong, decisive points – as happens when the defence is badly thought out and the defence counsel isn’t very good.

  Knowing exactly what happened does, however, have some not insignificant disadvantages from a psychological point of view. If the defendant is guilty and tells you so, this complicates how acceptable (to yourself) your choices as a defender are. For some, doing your best – even if respecting the rules – to obtain the acquit
tal of a defendant who has committed a brutal murder, a nasty armed robbery, an act of extortion, a rape, is the source of more than a slight sense of unease, which may backfire on you and have an impact on the efficacy of the defence.

  Fortunately, in the majority of cases, clients spare you the bother of confronting this ethical dilemma. Usually they lie, even to their lawyers, perhaps because they’re conscious of the risks that might derive from an excess of truth. In this way, they simplify things and make our lives less complicated from a moral point of view. For those of us who have morals.

  “I didn’t kill Gaglione. The whole thing’s ridiculous, and I want you to know that I didn’t kill him. And I don’t want you to answer me like the other lawyer.”

  “What did the other lawyer say?”

  “The thing is, I only talked to him twice. Which I think is odd, if someone’s supposed to be defending you on a murder charge.”

  Yes, it was odd. More than odd – downright wrong. But it accorded with Costamagna’s professional style, with the ideology that shone through his way of working and which he flaunted like a manifesto. What he felt for his clients (regardless of how good he’d been at defending them) was the contempt typical of many good lawyers. The clients, especially those guilty of serious crimes and coming from the underclass, were mainly opportunities for personal gain and, at the same time, opportunities to satisfy his own ego.

  I’m defending you because I want to show that I’m the best. Let’s be quite clear about this: I couldn’t care less what happens to you.

  “He said it didn’t matter if I was guilty or innocent,” he went on. “The problem was that it looked as if I was guilty. Trials aren’t about innocence or guilt, he kept saying. They’re about who wins and who loses.”

  Precisely. I felt as if I could hear this refrain of Costamagna’s. Innocence doesn’t interest us, and the same is true of guilt. A phrase that could also be understood in a technical sense: that what counts in trials is the algebra of the evidence. If it’s right, there’s a guilty verdict; if it’s wrong, there’s an acquittal. Except that for Costamagna, the phrase summed up a conception of our profession and, more generally, of the world. Moral categories and dilemmas don’t interest us. What matters is winning.

  “Okay. You didn’t kill Gaglione. Without sharing the opinion of your previous counsel, I do have to tell you that the evidence produced at the trial is very serious. The ruling is quite persuasive and we’ll have to find something concrete to propose to the appeal court as an alternative. I want you to tell me about the nature of your relationship with Gaglione and then, in detail, how you spent the day of the murder.”

  He nodded, and his eyes grew a little less empty, came back to life. He started speaking and continued for half an hour.

  The two of them had met in a gym. Both practised mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, violent disciplines that are now mostly seen on television and in tournaments. Gaglione had started supplying Cardace with synthetic drugs, which he pushed in discos around the province, and banned bodybuilding substances, sold in gyms to stupid kids who wanted to see their muscles grow in a few weeks.

  Cardace had never known who Gaglione got his supplies from. That isn’t the kind of question you ask in that world. You know what the other person decides to tell you, he said in the vaguely sententious tone of someone who wants to show he follows a system of adult rules.

  In the days preceding the murder, there had been a problem with some substances sold to bodybuilders by Cardace (who had got them from Gaglione). The owner of a gym had complained, claiming that he’d had the substances analysed and had ascertained that their composition didn’t correspond to what he’d paid for. So he’d asked for his money back. That morning Cardace had called Gaglione to complain in his turn and find out what had happened.

  Yes, it was true, the telephone calls had been a little animated because of that problem. Yes, it was true that he’d gone to Gaglione’s place to sort things out in person, because there are some things it’s best not to deal with over the phone. The two had talked things over and had made peace, and Gaglione, as a sign of reconciliation, had gifted Cardace about fifteen pills of a new version of Ecstasy that he himself had received only a few days earlier. They had parted amicably. As he went on his way, Cardace had run into an acquaintance named Sabino – he didn’t know his surname – and they had gone for a coffee together.

  Then he had returned home and soon afterwards had gone out again. The policeman had tracked him down outside a bar where he’d been hanging out with some friends (maybe customers, I thought) and had taken him to Headquarters. There they had given him a gunshot residue test and had arrested him for the Ecstasy pills they’d found on him. The same ones that Gaglione had given him. Since then he had been in prison.

  “Why did you go to Gaglione’s apartment? Why didn’t you meet him outside?”

  “He was paranoid at the time. He was scared of going out.”

  “Why?”

  “Among the various things Mino did was security. For discos, nightclubs, concerts. A few days before – maybe about ten days, I don’t know exactly – he’d worked at a disco called Chilometro Zero. Do you know it?”

  I nodded vaguely. I knew there was a place of that name, but nothing else.

  “Anyway, there was a fight. Two drunk guys had been pestering some girls and when one of the guys who was with these girls stood in their way they beat him up. That caused the usual ruckus and security intervened, including Mino. The two drunks were thrown out, but one of them wouldn’t calm down. He kept screaming, challenging everyone. Mino went up to him and told him to stop and get out, and the guy tried to headbutt him. That pissed Mino off and he gave him a good beating, leaving him on the ground. In the following days it turned out that the guy belonged to a major family. The kind you don’t want to mess with. Apparently the father of the boy was a very dangerous man.”

  “And so Gaglione was worried about possible reprisals?”

  “Yes, he was very worried. He went out only if it was absolutely necessary, and was even thinking of leaving Bari for a while. Maybe he’d even tried to get in touch with those people, to apologize and get the matter closed.”

  “Who was the guy he beat up? What family did he belong to?”

  “I don’t know. Gaglione didn’t tell me.”

  It struck me that although Cardace looked like a petty criminal (which is what he was), he was well spoken. He even had a beautiful voice, a detail I hadn’t noticed at first. If I’d talked to him on the phone, I would have imagined him looking completely different.

  As he spoke I kept looking for some resemblance to his mother. The colouring was his father’s, whoever that was. Lorenza’s hair was dark, or rather, it had been – now it was an opaque grey. There: opaque was the adjective that described her, in general. She was opaque, like the characters in a fantasy novel, beings who have lost their consistency and gradually become more and more evanescent. In other words, the exact opposite of the girl I’d known all those years ago. The creature of the past had been a luminous entity, who had seemed to glitter with her own almost tangible light.

  Cardace’s mouth was similar to his mother’s. The ears, too, a little larger than average. And as I listened to him speak, there was every now and again an inflection that seemed to have landed from a different place and a distant past.

  “You didn’t mention these things in your statements. Why?”

  “Avvocato Costamagna told me not to. He said it was all too vague, that the judges wouldn’t believe me, that they’d think it was an attempt to muddy the waters. They’d consider it completely irrelevant. And on the other hand, if a Mafia family really was involved, it was best not to alarm them with a statement that wouldn’t be of any use to me in court anyway.”

  Costamagna’s advice sounded terrible, but in itself wasn’t devoid of sense. Alluding to a possible connection with organized crime in order to suggest a narrative different from that of the prosecu
tion, as followed in the ruling, was worthless from a procedural point of view. It would have been too easy, in order to instil the idea of reasonable doubt, to maintain in general terms – without giving any more specific indication about people and context – that a murder victim feared reprisals from organized crime. Putting forward alternative hypotheses without any basis in fact, without any indication of individuals who might have been involved – both of which are indispensable if such hypotheses are to be considered by the judges – is pointless, if not counterproductive.

  And Costamagna was right on the second point, too. Assuming Gaglione really had aroused the avenging fury of some Mafia boss, and assuming that the murder was the result of that, there was a real risk that the mafiosi in question would feel threatened by the mention of a possible alternative lead that involved them.

  “Now we have to talk about the most important thing. The powder residue that was found on your jacket. I’ve read your statements. You maintained that you went shooting a few days earlier, wearing that jacket. You said you were in a quarry, with a friend, doing target practice. I’d like to know a bit more about that.”

  Cardace massaged his shoulder, as if his muscles were aching. It struck me he probably kept up his training, even in prison. His strong, muscular form was in strange contrast to the weakness of his expression. He shifted on his chair and crossed his legs. Tancredi had taught me that this might be a symptom of lying, or of reluctance to speak. I made a note of it. Making notes almost always makes me feel a little ridiculous, as if I were striking a pose, trying to live up to a certain image. But I’ve often reread my notes and got some good ideas from them that hadn’t even occurred to me as I was listening to somebody or reading something.