The courtroom where Caldarola was due to preside was in the middle of a very busy corridor. As usual on trial days, the place was completely chaotic. There was a real mixture of people: the defendants, their lawyers, policemen and carabinieri who were due to testify, a few pensioners who spent their interminable mornings watching trials instead of playing briscola on park benches. Everyone knew them by now and they knew and greeted everyone.
A few yards from this group, there were other people with pieces of paper in their hands, looking lost, or like people who’d rather they weren’t there. They were right. They were witnesses in the various trials, usually crime victims, and the pieces of paper told them they were obliged to appear before a judge and “in the event of non-appearance not due to a legitimate impediment would be liable to be forced to appear, accompanied by the police, and would be subject to a fine of…” and so on, and so forth.
Even in the best of cases, they were about to live through a surreal experience. One that wouldn’t increase their faith in justice.
Between the two groups, the passing crowd moved in a constant stream. Assistants with trolleys and heaps of files, defendants looking for their own courtrooms or their own lawyers, prison warders escorting prisoners in chains, bewildered black faces, tattooed villains – obviously regular clients of the courts and police stations – other villains who you realized after a few moments were police officers from the street crimes squad, young lawyers with unseasonable tans, big collars and big knotted ties, and normal people scattered through the courts for the most varied reasons. Almost never good ones.
All of them would have liked to get out of here as quickly as possible. Me too.
Sister Claudia was sitting on a bench, staring at a grimy wall. In the usual leather jacket, and militarystyle trousers with big pockets. Nobody had sat down next to her. Nobody was standing too close to her either. For a second or two, the written words Keep your distance flashed through my mind.
I don’t know how it was that she saw me, because she really did seem to be staring at that wall in front of her and I was coming from the side, through the crowd. The fact is, when I was about six yards away from her, she turned her head as if obeying a silent command and immediately stood up with that sinuous, dangerous, predatory movement of hers.
I stopped in front of her, not much more than a foot away. Encroaching into that bubble where nobody else dared enter. I nodded my head in greeting and she responded in the same way.
“What are you doing here?”
For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw something like embarrassment on her face, even a slight blush. It was only a fraction of a second, and maybe I only imagined it. When she spoke, her voice was the way it had been the other times: grey, like the steel of a knife.
“Martina isn’t coming. You told her not to. So I’ve come to see how it goes and then tell her about it.”
I nodded and told her we could go into court. The hearing would be starting soon, and it was a good idea to be there to hear what time our case would be dealt with. As I said it, I realized I hadn’t yet seen Scianatico, or even Delissanti.